Sound art

Background
The beginning
Types of sound art

Site-specific
Contemporary sound art
Soundwalks
Sound structure | installation | sculpture
Film and video as Sonic art
Background

Phonograph by Thomas Edison (1847-1931)
- Of all his inventions, Edison was most fond of the phonograph. He made it possible to "install sound" to have sound be something that could take place a space.
- The audio recording could register the sound of a voice, a piano, a birdsong, a wind... the recording apparatus made no distinction between actual and recorded sounds, which is crucially important for how artists came to think about sound and its relationship to music.
- Artists quickly registered them and the non-musical sound could be received and appreciated aesthetically.
- Following the 20th century, the boundaries of "what constitutes a work of art" have been pushed to include mediums outside of the traditional forms of painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, and sculpture.
Luigi Russolo (1885-1947)
- One of the most important figures of sound art was a futurist painter Luigi Russolo.
  
  “The contemporary orchestra is useless. The traditional musical instruments are worthless. We now need a new art form <The Art of Noises> (1913) and we need new instruments to make them happen. The musical sound is too limited in its variety of timbres.
  
  We must break out of this limited circle of sounds and conquer the infinite variety of noise sounds. Let us cross the large modern capital with our ears more sensitive than our eyes."
Sound poetry
- Shortly after Russolo’s Futurist Manifesto, the cultural fascination with noise was extended to poetry by futurists and Dadaist artists who sought to "eliminate meaning in favor of purely sonic values."
- Sound poetry is an artistic form bridging literacy and musical composition, in which the phonetic aspects of human speech are foregrounded instead of more conventional semantic and syntactic values; "verse without words".
  
  Bob Cobbing - "Alphabet of fishes"
  Kurt Schwitters Ursonate 1932
Pierre Schaeffer (1910-1995) and Concrete music
- Pierre Schaeffer was a pioneering figure in the world of experimental music, and he is most widely recognized for his groundbreaking work in developing "musique concrète (concrete music)", a unique and early form of avant-garde music.
- Most famous recording was a set of train sounds that he had recorded at Paris.
  
  Cinq etudes de bruits - Etude aux tourniquets (Five noise studies - Turnstile study)
- Unlike conventional music, which is typically based on written scores and performed by musicians using standard instruments, musique concrète involved the manipulation of recorded sounds, or "real" sounds, to create new and innovative musical compositions.
- The term "concrete music" is then, in essence, the breaking down of the structured production of traditional instruments, harmony, rhythm, and even music theory itself, to reconstruct music from the bottom up.
- His contributions to concrete music represent a significant milestone in the history of music, shifting the paradigm of what music could be and how it could be created.
- His work continues to inspire and challenge composers, sound designers, and artists who seek to push the boundaries of sound and music.
- He emphasized the importance of "playing" in the creation of music. Schaeffer's idea of "jeu" comes from the French verb jouer, which carries the same meaning as the English verb "play": 'to enjoy oneself by interacting with one's surroundings'.
Halim El-Dabh (1921-2017) "My Life is Vibration"
- Halim El-Dabh was an Egyptian composer. He is particularly known as an early pioneer of electronic music.
- Having borrowed a wire recorder from the offices of Middle East Radio, El-Dabh took it to the streets to capture outside sounds, specifically an ancient zaar ceremony, a type of exorcism conducted in public.
- Intrigued by the possibilities of manipulating recorded sound for musical purposes, he believed it could open up the raw audio content of the zaar ceremony to further investigation into "the inner sound" contained within.

In 1944 he composed one of the earliest known works of "tape music", or concrete music.

Wire Recorder Piece (1944) Halim El-Dabh

John Cage (1912 -1992)
- One more key moment in the prehistory of sound art was that in 1948, John Cage conceived a plan to compose a four-minute piece of uninterrupted silence, and to sell it to the music corporations but it never happened.
- In 1952, he encountered a set of white paintings by Robert Rauschenberg, "White Painting [three panel]".
- Many viewers did not even perceive that they had been painted. One of the strongest supporters of Rauschenberg’s work was John Cage.
- This had a tremendous impact on Cage. Cage said that his decision to create 4’33” (1952) came after seeing Rauschenberg’s White Paintings.
- 4’33” is meant to be perceived as consisting of the "sounds of the environment" that the listeners hear while it is performed.

Just as Cage wanted us to listen to the ambient sounds in 4’33”, Rauschenberg wants us to read the ambient visuals in his White Paintings.
In Cage’s work, we hear what is normally inaudible. The ambient noise of a concert hall is what we ignore when we focus on a piece.
The premiere of 4’33” took place at the Maverick Concert Hall, Woodstock, New York. The audience, not prepared to listen to itself, was anxious and finally many people walked out.
Cage said after the performance,

"They missed the point. There’s no such thing as silence. What they thought was silence, because they didn’t know how to listen, was full of accidental sounds. You could hear the wind stirring outside during the first movement. During the second, raindrops began pattering the roof, and during the third the people themselves made all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked out."

Discussions of 4’33” have tended to conclude that its purpose is to emphasize that there is no such thing as true silence and to encourage listeners to appreciate the raw, unorchestrated aural experience of the world around them.
Cage thought of this as a certain kind of music, in fact, he came to say music is more interesting than music made by instruments.
Cage considered silence to be neither the opposite of sound and music nor its absence.
For him, silence was a landscape of unintentional sounds experienced between intentional sounds; as such, it was absolutely substantive, inseparable from and interdependent with sound.
Now this piece is often thought of as a kind of specific silent piece, but as Cage constantly reminded people that

“There's no such thing as silence”, he famously said, “there is no such thing as an empty space or empty time. There's always something to see, something to hear.”
Composed in 1951 for pianist David Tudor, Music of Changes (1951) is a ground-breaking piece of indeterminate music.
The process of composition involved applying decisions made using the I Ching (易經, usually translated Book of Changes, is an ancient Chinese divination/fortune-telling text). The I Ching was applied to large charts of sounds, durations, dynamics, tempo and densities.

Music of Changes (1951) John Cage

Harry Partch (1901-1974)
- a visionary and eclectic composer and instrument builder, largely self-taught, whose compositions are remarkable for the complexity of their scores (each instrument has its own characteristic notation, often involving 43 tones to each octave) and their employment of unique instruments of his invention.
  
  The Outsider: The Story of Harry Partch
  
  --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The beginning
- The definition of sound art
  - Art which uses "sound" both as its medium (what it is made out of) and as its subject (what it is about).
  - Sound art is an artistic discipline in which sound is utilized as a primary medium or material. Like many genres of contemporary art, sound art is interdisciplinary in nature, or is used in hybrid forms.
  - Other artistic lineages from which sound art emerges are conceptual art, minimalism, site-specific art, sound poetry, electro-acoustic music, spoken word, avant-garde poetry, sound scenography, and experimental theatre...
- The term Sound art

The first use as the title of an exhibition at a major museum was 1979's "Sound Art" at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), featuring Maggi Payne, Connie Beckley, and Julia Heyward.
The curator, Barbara London, said that

"Sound art pieces are more closely allied to art than to music, and are usually presented in the museum, gallery, or alternative space."

Music vs Sound art

Music is sound, but not all music is sound art.
Music is fundamentally about organizing sound in time.
Music exists for its own cultural reasons, and they are not always the same as when it is used in sound art.
When music is used in sound art, and it has an entirely different purpose and effect than the same music used in a traditional music listening situation. Situation is important.
Sound art exists within the world of art and can include music. Sound art may also include nonmusical sounds. All of which is presented as a work of art.

Types of sound art
- Site-specific
  - The term site-specific refers to a work of art designed specifically for a particular location and that has an interrelationship with the location.
  - In 1966, the avant-garde percussionist Max Neuhaus brought Cage’s concept outside of the concert hall and made the first steps toward sound art.
    
    “I became interested in going a step further,”... “Why limit listening to the concert hall? Instead of bringing these sounds into the hall, why not simply take the audience outside?”
  - In his project called <Listen>, Neuhaus invited audiences to a concert venue, rubber-stamped the word “LISTEN” onto their hands.
  - And then, without saying a word, lead them outside the hall through various urban sound environments, power plants, highway, subway stations, or city street life.
  - This was an early attempt by an artist to "incorporate environmental sound as a major part of a nonmusical work, outside of the concert hall".
  - Alvin Lucier (1931-2021)
    - I'm sitting in a room (1970) features Lucier recording himself narrating a text, and then playing the tape recording back into the room, re-recording it.
    - The new recording is then played back and re-recorded, and this process is repeated.
    - Due to the room's particular size and geometry, certain frequencies of the recording are emphasized while others are attenuated.
    - Eventually the words become unintelligible, replaced by the characteristic resonant frequencies of the room itself.

Contemporary sound art
- Sound is materially invisible but very visceral and emotive. It can define a space at the same time as it triggers a memory.
- Since the introduction of digital technology, sound art has undergone a radical transformation.
- Artists can now create visual images in response to sounds, allow the audience to control the art through pressure pads, sensors and voice activation...
- The widespread availability of digital tools enabled translations across media that allow ordinary people to do things that otherwise require big institutional support.
- Musicians and artists look for other venues and ways to present their work.
- Phill Niblock (1933-2024) an American composer, filmmaker, and videographer.
  - The pioneer of Drone music, the sound without melody or rhythm. Movement is slow, geologically slow. Changes are almost imperceptible, and his music has a tendency of creeping up on you.
    Harm (2003) Phill Niblock

Christian Marclay (1955- ) a visual artist and composer
- Marclay's work explores connections between sound, noise, photography, video, and film.
  Christian Marclay on Night Music

Tarek Atoui (1980- ) a Lebanese contemporary artist and composer
- He engineers complex and inventive instruments as well as arranges and curates interventions, concerts, performances,
Haroon Mirza (1977- ) a British contemporary visual artist, of Pakistani descent
- Mirza challenges the barriers between sound, noise, and music by crossing wires and thinking about his work as a process of manipulating electricity.

Christine Sun Kim (1980 - ) an American sound artist
- A deaf artist. In developing her personal visual language, Kim draws from a variety of information systems.
- She further uses sound to explore her own relationship to verbal languages and her environment. Through her work, she gains control of voice and sound, seeking to release them from social conventions.
  
  MoMA show
Charmaine Lee (1991- ) an Australian vocalist based in New York
- uses extended vocal technique, amplification, feedback, and microphones to augment and distort the voice.
Lesley Flanigan an experimental electronic musician
- explores the relationships between the voice and space via feedback & sine waves.
Edwin Wise
- Cymatics - Voice Coil Chladni Plate Driver
  
  --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Soundwalks
- A "soundwalk" is a walk with a focus on listening to the environment.
- The term was first used by members of the World Soundscape Project (WSP) under the leadership of composer R. Murray Schafer in Vancouver in the 1970s.
- Hildegard Westerkamp from the WSP defines soundwalking as
  
  "... any excursion whose main purpose is listening to the environment. It is exposing our ears to every sound around us no matter where we are.
- The World Soundscape Project was established as an educational and research group by R. Murray Schafer at Simon Fraser University during the late 1960s and early 1970s.
- R. Murray Schafer (1933-2021)
  - Schafer was a Canadian composer who popularized the term "soundscape".

Hildegard Westerkamp (1946 -)

She focuses on listening, environmental sound and acoustic ecology, describes the purpose of the soundwalk as “exposing our ears to every sound around us no matter where we are.”
She advocated taking soundwalks (that were not mediated by technology) as “a form of active participation in the soundscape.”
While the original concept of the soundwalk as Westerkamp calls it, remains an unmediated experience, the sound artist may leverage the concept by using media to capture, distribute, and record the sound as a component of their sound art.

Bill Fontana (1947 - )
- He takes us to his commissioned sound installation Sonic Shadows (2010) the museum's San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) boiler room.

Sound structure | Installation | Sculpture | Conceptual art
- It's not coincidental that sound installation emerged during the 1960s in which the art world witnessed the "dematerialization of the art object".
  
  "The "dematerialization of art" in contemporary art refers to turning away from traditional art objects like painting, and exploring conceptual work through performance, installation, and newer mediums. It is a shift towards art that is focused on ideas and the experience rather than physical materials.

For artists, this meant a turn away from the production of objects toward the production of "ideas or words" to express them right, that is toward "conceptual art".
Robert Morris (1931-2018) an American sculptor, conceptual artist and writer
- Morris and others took a very different path away from the art object toward the exploration of material processes.
- This group was often influenced by Cage, who objected to conventional musical composition.
- Cage advocated that artists take inspiration from nature and compose what he called a "Purposeless play".
- Nature doesn't have a purpose; it just runs, and Cage famously said that art has to imitate nature in her manner of operation. Imitate that kind of purposelessness.
- Morris embraced Cage’s use of everyday sound and chance and focused on embodying the idea of the work in the process of art making.
  Box with the Sound of Its Own Making (1961)
- Morris expanded concepts of what art could be. As its title indicates, it consists of an unadorned wooden cube, accompanied by a recording of the sounds produced during its construction that lasts for 3.5 hours.
- The first person Morris invited to see the piece was John Cage. Morris later recalled...
  
  "When Cage came, I turned it on... and he wouldn't listen to me. He sat and listened to it for three hours and that was really impressive to me. He just sat there."
- Morris wasn't alone. Michael Asher, Bruce Nauman and many artists were interested in moving away from the art object, towards "sound, concept, idea and language".
Maryanne Amacher (1938-2009) an American composer and installation artist
- Amacher was a composer of large-scale sound installations and a highly original thinker in the areas of perception, sound spatialization, creative intelligence, and aural architecture.
- Often considered to be a part of a post-Cagean lineage, her work anticipates some of the most important developments in network culture, media arts, acoustic ecology, and sound studies.
  
  Living sound (1980) Maryanne Amacher

Akio Suzuki (1941 - ) a Japanese musician, sound artist, inventor, and instrument builder
- Since his infamous “Throwing Objects Down a Staircase” event at Nagoya Station in 1963 and the self-study events, Suzuki has pursued listening as a practice.
- In the 1970s he created and began performing on a number of original instruments, including the echo instrument Analapos.
- In 1996, he began his “o to da te” project where he seeks out echo points in the urban environment.
- Conceptual Sound Work (2020)

Akio Suzuki plays Baschet Sound Sculptures

Christina Kubisch (1948 - ) a German composer, sound artist, performance artist, professor
- Christina Kubisch is a German sound artist. She composes both electronic and acoustic music for multimedia installations.
- She gained recognition in the mid-1970s from her early works including concerts, performances and installations.
- She focuses on finding sounds and music in unusual places that participants would normally not think of as somewhere to experience sound.

Janet Cardiff (1957 - ) a Canadian artist who works with sound and sound installations
- Her The Forty Part Motet is deceptively simple in appearance.
- The sculpture consists of 40 speakers, each playing one singer’s voice.

Harry Bertoia (1915-1978) an Italian-born American artist, sound art sculptor, and modern furniture designer
- Arguing for a new form of music based on the sounds of industrialization.
- He was making kinetic sound sculpture through the 1960s - 1970s.
The Singing Ringing Tree (2006) by Mike Tonkin and Anna Liu
- The Singing Ringing Tree is a wind powered sound sculpture resembling a tree set in the landscape of the Pennine hill range overlooking Burnley, in Lancashire, England.

The Sea organ by Nikola Bašić
- The Sea organ is an architectural sound art object located in Zadar, Croatia and an experimental musical instrument, which plays music by way of sea waves and tubes located underneath a set of large marble steps.
- The waves interact with the organ and create somewhat random but harmonic sounds.

Céleste Boursier-Mougenot (1961 - ) a French artist
- Clinamen (2013) Floating porcelain bowls clink together as they circulate gently on water, producing a percussive soundscape of unexpected musicality.

Zimoun (1977 - ) a Swiss artist
- He is most known for his sound sculptures, sound architectures and installation art.
- Using simple and functional components, Zimoun builds architecturally-minded platforms of sound. Exploring mechanical rhythm and flow in prepared systems, his installations incorporate commonplace industrial objects.
Pinuccio Sciola (1942 -2016) an Italian sculptor
- Singing rock

Film and video as Sonic art
- Bill Viola (1951-2024) an American video artist
  - Bill Viola's artistic expression depended upon electronic, sound, and image technology in new media.
  - His works focus on the ideas behind fundamental human experiences such as birth, death, and aspects of consciousness.

<Leviathan> (2012) by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel
- Tiny waterproof cameras captured the film’s raw images and natural sounds. This film is extraordinary sonically.