Category: intro to sound arts

Thinking more about how we can describe sound arts, a few key words keep sticking out to me:

exploration/play, immersion and concept.

These are qualities I find in my favourite pieces, they seem to create through lines in work that makes it feel more cohesive. For example, I see the concept in Laurie Anderson’s ‘handphone table’ as the question:

How can we truly feel sound?

This piece takes sound, a usually shared, leaky substances, and traps it in the form of this table. Transforming sound a very intimate, personal object.

exploration/play

As an artist, exploration means everything. I believe there is no better way to find your voice. Experiment how many different ways that you could achieve the same effect. Perhaps, after some exploration, none of the outcomes are to your liking. Find out why. We should aim to be inquisitive in everything we set out to do.

immersion

When I say immersion I’m talking about being present in the moment. Listening and paying attention to each small detail, when your edges begin to bleed into the environment. It’s the idea that an artist or listener can completely lose themselves in the work, the research behind it or the environment the work is being made/presented in. Hans Witschi’s instagram page is probably my favourite showcase of this. He posts field recordings of everyday sounds we would usually ignore.

Wind passing through blinds, cars driving over drain covers, the vibration of a bus window.

Witschi confronts you with the musicality of the mundane and welcomes us to tune ourselves into the sound of our own environments.

concept

This is the idea that work begins as abstract ideas, like I mentioned earlier with Laurie Andersons piece. We can often times see the artists thought patterns through their work, most evident in John Cage’s piece ‘4’33″‘. Although it is not to my taste, this piece makes the audience part of the orchestra, which I do think is an interesting idea. Shuffling, coughing, squeaking or any other non-orchestral sound become the main focus, which raise some questions about silence, listening and audience interaction within performance culture on a wider scale.

I love that sound arts is inherently hard to define.

The fact that the art form itself asks us so many questions gives us an almost infinite amount of room for experimentation. Take the work of Yoshi Sodeoka, Etienne Krähenbühl or Max Neuhaus, for example. Think about how different the experience of these artists work would be. Yet, I would still place most of their pieces in this sound arts puzzle. I would like to highlight some of my initial interests.

Although a lot of the works we have been shown during lectures thus far has been very traditional (created by white, bourgeois men), I believe sound arts to be limitlessly freeing. For around three years I have been watering down my work to make it have some sort of ‘musical correctness’, when in fact I should have been trying to find the sounds which resonate within myself.

I believe sound arts to be an intrinsically political form in the context of the 21st century. Everybody is aware of the lacking diversity there is in the history books, this is especially relevant to sound arts as it is still a relatively young practice. But in the short amount of time since sound arts was coined, progress has been made in giving voices to those who were previously voiceless. Though there is still work to be done, I have felt the warmth of passion about this topic when talking to peers in and around shows and exhibition spaces.

Roland Barthes the death of the author

Barthes suggests that the author only exists to prop up the idea of the critic, and the critic only exists to decipher the authors intention (p. 147, 1967). No-one learns in this case, as the text purely exists as a canvas to explore the author, instead of the text existing with themes worth exploring on their own merit.

Reference

Barthes R. (1967) Image, Music, Text. London: Fontana.

‘Three Tape Loops Destructing Over Three Hours’ and postmodernism

Hainbach is a German artist that I have been following for some time now, he uses vintage electronics to create experimental music. In the piece I would like to take a look at today, he uses reel to reel tape machines along with scalpels, knives and sandpaper to create the sound sculpture above. I think this pieces destructive, antiform nature alone could place it within postmodernism.

Although 3 hours might seem like a long time, this piece seeks to accelerate the fatal flaw of tape, its degradation. This decomposition would be happening to any tape being used normally over the span of years. However, choosing to display the process of such destruction highlights the temporality of sound, can sound truly last forever?

I like to imagine that if this piece was created for an exhibition space, people would be able to interact with the destruction of the tapes to give the piece a greater level of openness and audience participation. As artists we can use this work as a teacher and realise we don’t need to use every tool for its intended purpose. It is our intentions that will shape the work.