For the past hour I have listened to a man carefully describe the sleeve covers of a rather large record collection. I have not gone on a date with the most tedious music geek on the planet. This, my friends, is sonic art.

Every Monday until September 14, for one hour the art radio station Resonance 104.4FM is turning its airspace into gallery space for works of sound art. This is a phrase that would usually send me screaming in search of a silent room, but this velvet-voiced description of unnamed album sleeves by the graphic design collective åbäke, is weirdly engaging. You never hear the album title; it’s like being at a virtual pub quiz (which is how it was recorded).

Anna Colin, who curated the series, was particularly intrigued by the radio format and the way it could be used to create artworks. “Most of the artists we have used usually make visual work. I’m interested in how they translate their practice to this format.”

The works in the series avoid the conventions of radio, the clichéd devices and rhythms that structure it, and instead try to make something new. Many of the programmes will go out live.

But sound art is not just restricted to avant-garde radio. Its origins lie in the early 20th century, with the Futurist painter and musician Luigi Russolo. In his manifesto The Art of Noises (1913), he wrote: “This musical evolution is paralleled by the multiplication of machines.”

He was right. Much of today’s sound art wasn’t possible until recently, for lack of appropriate technology. But now, for example, Longplayer, by Jem Finer, the former banjo player for the Pogues, is noodling away to itself and to any visitors who may pop up to the listening post at Trinity Buoy Wharf in East London — and will, theoretically, continue to do so without repetition until December 31, 2999. It took four years to create the computer programme that allows this to happen. Another recent work that uses radical new technology is Whiteplane_2, a sound and light installation by Alex Bradley and Charles Poulet. They use ambisonics (3-D sound) and LED systems to create a sound sculpture. Sitting between two horizontal planes, the viewer is enveloped by sound from a circle of 12 speakers accompanied by sweeps of coloured light. Bodies in the space alter the dynamic and make for a unique personal experience.

“Sound art is one of the simplest and most complex things,” Bradley enthuses. “By moving air, you can make people get very emotional.”

David Rogerson of Sonic Arts Network, which promotes the artform, agrees. “You can be very minimal and personal or you can go macro and fill an entire space. You can awe with sound.”

It can certainly be quite disturbing. In 2003 Janet Cardiff devised a CD for visitors to the Whitechapel Gallery in London, which they took on a tour around the East End in a personal CD player. “You’d be walking along the street and hear footsteps behind you and a voice would whisper: ‘There’s someone following you’,” recalls Sam Chatterton-Dixon, of Flowers East gallery. “You’d hear a car going past but there’d be no car. Very disconcerting.”

Christina Kubisch, a pioneer of German Klangkunst since the early 1980s, has developed another personal, portable sound installation for the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham. Electrical Walks comprises a pair of magnetic headphones that picks up otherwise undetectable frequencies from electrical systems such as those in traffic lights, security devices and mobile phones.

One problem with sound art is the difficulty of making a value judgment. Conceptually, much of it sounds absurd. A big horn parping the noise of dripping water out of a hole in the ground? Come off it. Yet this is Finer’s latest project. What it does, however, is make the viewer, or listener, aware of how they hear and the potential value in ambient sounds. And learning to listen a little more carefully can only be a good thing.

Longplayer can also be heard at www.longplayer.org. Whiteplane_2 is at Newbury Corn Exchange from Friday until July 27 (www.whiteplane2.org). Electrical Walks is at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (www.ikon-gallery.co.uk), from July 26