By the 1950s and 1960s visual artists and composers like Bill Fontana were using kinetic sculptures and electronic media, overlapping live and pre-recorded sound, in order to explore the space around them.

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, and in examples like Jem Finer’s Longplayer, extend a sound so that it resonates for a thousand years.

Does the exquisitely dissonant institution of sound art, and its subsequent ordering of desire, ensure that we subscribe to a genealogy through which it is governed? In this composition I hear a rhizomic collective, which obeys, albeit contradictorily, a government of past and future time. Historical mapping reconceptualized, audibly so.

I hear the pop, clunk, hum, clink, buzz of the sonic agent provocateurs scrambling to inscribe difference.

‘Tomtoumtomtoumtomtoum’; the ‘Cage’ of sound arts past. I hear hindsight.

‘Bwwaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa’; the sound of sound arts future.

I hear possibility, dynamic, open, multiple, textured, outside ‘time, (is there outside time?). Referring to Heidegger, Derrida describes how, in the nonvulgar or ‘Greek’ conception of time, times past, present, and future converge and diverge; they are at once glancing, touching and yet so very distant. The nonvulgar appear and disappear in this composition’s motifs, they ascribe difference, blend and further differentiate how I listen. I hear the sound of the oncoming community, Nietzsche’s Übermenschare, nonvulgar, allegorical.

This sonic journey has no pause, the repeating beating ‘new order’ of fleeting voices propels concepts adnauseam. Everything that can happen is happening, and not only once, but infinitely. Turning and returning. It does not go along with a simple, linear, modernist scenario. But further problematizes sonic arts institutionalized patterns of irrationality.

Further along the plane I hear double meanings, a double-pincer of the future: one linear, one nonlinear.

It invokes individuation, movement, body, and sensation. Voicing announcements of the future of noise; whilst scattering uncanny silence, more a buzz than a beep of the future becoming. Is this a compositional transformative strategy, or my listening as relational and ultimately performative? I hear the sonic future that never arrives because it was already always here. It sounds nonlinear, atemporal or polymorphically temporal. It presents post-human possibilities as resonant and reverberant.

Ironically, this playful and metaphorical collage of sound arts genealogy is not only broader, but more literally plausible than what Heidegger calls the received or “vulgar” view of orderly, progressive, linear time. Language itself, the splintering of sounds into signs, into embodied and disembodied representations, signals and signifiers, call into question my subjective image of the past: a schizophrenic plane of signification, a neurotic creativity, the disunity of the singularity of becoming sonic.

Finally, I hear silence, an absent sense of knowing, of the heard, that I project into a future: pop merging with click, and dissolution into ecstasy, which relieves my constitutive sense of loss. Lacan suggests that this loss is based on the illusion of the uncoordinated. As a listener at the end of this work I feel like a wobbly toddler looking in the mirror and happily hallucinating in my own disunity. Once again language splintering signification. I am left with the idea of an uncomfortable wholeness. The reconciliation of sound arts past with its future seems like an empirical illusion.

Ennioa Neoptolomus

An engaging sound collage presenting an unique historical documentation of Sound Art from the early 20th century to present day. The composition weaves through different sound works throughout the century with narratives and ideas from some of the prominent artists in the field. A retrospective into the craft of sound and its development as an artistic practice, from Edison’s first sound film in 1895 to today, including the thoughts and concepts which served the basis for the creation of these works as spoken by the artists themselves.

This is an animation (created by John Roach) of the printed timeline created by Cahen and Taylor that a listener can follow as he or she experiences the work. The printed booklet can be downloaded here:
joelcahen.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/ahosa-print.pdf

commissioned by Newtoy as part of the Wet Sounds 2011 UK Tour

Exhibited at:
On the Edge of Perceptibility / Sound Art – International Sound Installation Exhibition in Budapest, 17th Oct. – 23rd Nov. 2014

Austrian-born artist, Bernhard Leitner, talks about his sound spaces with reSITE at RESONATE. Using the “vocabulary of sound,” Leitner discusses how he uses sound to define space and create completely new worlds.

RESONATE: Thinking Sound & Space was a conference on architecture, art and sound. It took place on 12 February 2018 at MAAT Museum, Lisbon, Portugal in collaboration with Meyer Sound. Video co-produced by reSITE & Canal 180

Original Soundtrack by FR33BACK

It is a synesthetic sculpture which interprets and dynamically transforms solar light into audio frequencies and focuses on a very specific area – the former music pavilion in Hamm, build in 1912. By mixing sound and architecture the audience experience a peculiar oneiric reality through the superimposition of colours, shapes, sounds and vibrations. A high-quality digital camera mounted on the top of the structure films the sky and divide it into six colour models - RGB and CMY. The resulting data is transformed into sound which reacts along with fluctuating atmospheric conditions, creating a unique and variable composition. A series of woofers, are fixed directly on the bottom of each inner column, and convert the whole architecture into a giant vibrating loudspeaker. Visitors can have additional complimentary visual experiences by changing their point of view from within the installation. A person can "filter" their surroundings with one single primary or secondary colour, but also mix different ones together. SOUND of LIGHT is a composition of hue, saturation, and light. People always have the possibility to discover their own concert which arises from their unique point of view – an individual spectrum.

Sound plays a major part in the environment, which brings forward the question of where sound stands in terms of communication. Artists and designers have used sound as an inspiration for years. Even on a general bases we communicate best through talking and loud gestures like clapping in order to show appreciation. This project not only facilitates the deaf to see music but also allows an ordinary person to create their own art piece based on their favourite music / audio book ect.

In most cases the design is dictating the sound. For example an orchestra is set up such to play a certain set of instruments in order to create a melody. In this case the sound dictates the design and reveals unexpected forms.

Is there such a thing as Sound Art? And if so, what is it?

There seems to be no absolute consensus as to what might constitute Sound Art, the only generally recognised criteria being, perhaps, the presence of some sonic element (whether audible or inaudible, material or conceptual) and artistic intention. But deciding the point at which the sonic and the intention begin or end seems to be up to each individual person – ultimately there are as many definitions of the category as there are people questioned.

Sound Art? Is an investigation of the blurriness of artistic categories, an attempt to obliquely arrive at a definition and perhaps show the usefulness, or otherwise, of such a definition.

The work’s aim is to throw up questions and provide start-points for debate, more than provide answers.

Many thanks go to the wonderful individuals who kindly took part in the interviews which made up the material of these piece:

Alan Licht
Alexander Williams
Anna Raimondo
Clive Graham
David Toop
Giorgio Sadotti
Iris Garrelfs
Mark Jackson
Matthew Lee Knowles
Mike Harding
Pauline Oliveros

A surreal portal into the psychological state experienced during infinite regress such as in discourse on the origin of the universe (i.e. the ontological, cosmological, and design proofs for the existence of God). To reflect the neutrality yielded, visual perception is distorted as the figures literally fall straight down but appear to be falling into the z-depth or spiraling downward (illusion created with animated fractal) or both. Aural understanding is halted by a processed/texturized Shepard tone (series of sine wave octaves creating the illusion of tones descending infinitely yet remaining constant). All physically impossible conditions that are perceived to be happening all at once and shifting back and forth, creating an overall infinite stasis in perception.