Sound Off about Sound Art!

kate and HSA to thread!

little do you know...

Coldcut and Scanner to thredd, anyway.

but that is quite diff from 'sound art', I think.

OK, from what I have gathered from my VERY LIMITED EXPERIENCE of SoundArt ("top-draw totty"... he gets kicked under the table for that!):

It is the creation of compositions from not-necessarily-musical elements.

In its most elemenal form, this seems to be just "field recordings" of existing phenomena. In more advanced forms, the SoundArtist takes these "found sounds" or manufactures sounds of their own and puts them together into a composition (either through tape loops or more commonly these days sampling) much the same way that a composer creates a symphony out of *musical* elements.

I heard a Chris Watson (note to self - *please* stop calling him Chris Martin) composition which made it all make sense to me. He had recorded all sorts of sounds in a rain forest before, during and after a thunderstorm. The same way that a composer would use violin arpeggios or flute trills or kettledrum notes and melodies to create a cohesive piece of music with themes and movements and a musical "plot" - he assembled squealing pigs and birdcalls and thunderbolts the same way to create a cohesive piece.

At least that's my understanding of it.

sound art is kind of like installations and things like this take place in art galleries. since i refuse to step in fucking art galleries I might be wrong.

'500' people is a bit much.

surely sound art includes all art that makes sound...has anyone seen christian marclay's "impossible instruments" show? it was brill...

This was sound art, in that it was pieces of art that made sounds. Sound art seems to be such a nebulous concept, so many different things are classed as "sound art" it seems ridiculous.

I liked the "turntables" piece that you looked where the record players should be and there were weird electromagnetic fields controlling metal filings instead of records. That was cool.

yeah harry bertoia (i think that's his name) used to make sculptures that made 'sounds'. I've seeen pics => they look grate!

"While operating and overlapping with music, sound art distinguishes itself by the simple fact that music is not necessarily about sound. It may draw upon acoustics, expand aurality, and produce sonic experience; but it does not necessarily set up a reflective relationship between itself and the subject of sound as an investigation. "

i'm not sure if i quite believe this. do you?

this book comes highly recommended if you're doing further research (out of print, search your libraries)

author: Dan Lander, Micah Lexier (editors)

title: Sound by Artists

publisher:Art Metropole, Toronto.

isbn: 0-920956-23-8

description: a collection of artists writings including... Cage, Viola, Neuhaus, Kubisch, Bruinsma, Monahan, Lucier, Whitehead, Schafer, Lockwood, Westerkamp, Marclay. ESSENTIAL READING.

...most people don't really listen to music that carefully

but there's a problem if we're putting the onus on some theoretical listener to listen carefully enough to let us know when what they're hearing stops being music and starts being, yknow, Art? labelle goes on to talk about how this definition isnt limited to the formal, but we all know music plays at a similar self-referentiality (and acknowledgement of its audience and modes of reception etc etc). i mean, isnt "what da hook gon be?" enough of a counterexample? i suppose labelle would counter that not every pop song is so 'meta', except i've a sneaking feeling that every pop song.. is. necessarily.

I remember spending myself on the 'is electronic music?' thread, on which I throughly embarrassed myself. Else I'd jump right in.

I do find that many sound artists are concerned with the subject of sound as an investigation. The fact that something is sound and not, say, writing or coloured paste is of very little interest to me, though I'm probably as much a sound artist as anything.

I don't know what he means by music not necessarily being about sound, either. I think any of that kind of necessity or lack of necessity could come about for someone at any given time. Maybe I'm missing something, but it makes more sense to me to say that sound isn't necessarily about music.

'sound art' seems to be an useful term to describe composers that are working in diff media. I don't mind either way.

"While operating and overlapping with music, sound art distinguishes itself by the simple fact that music is not necessarily about sound. It may draw upon acoustics, expand aurality, and produce sonic experience; but it does not necessarily set up a reflective relationship between itself and the subject of sound as an investigation. "

i'm not sure if i quite believe this. do you?

-- m. (mitchnet70NOSPA...), October 15th, 2004. (later)

Music that takes place outside the gallery may also draw upon acousitcs etc. too - so it seems to be about producing different types of effects, and the interaction with other media is part of that.

'are some musics/sounds more about themselves than other musics/sounds?'

I guess that is why an investigation takes place? But I'm not sure how that works out.

i'm still battling with this: when we extract 'musicality' from sound, are we left with sound as physiological effect only, or is there more than that? i'm going back and forward between supporting this idea that the musical is limited in its approach to sound as object, as 'thing' (and its investigations into how we make meaning from that thing) and thinking that the musical is ALWAYS about that, even covertly.

Right, exactly, but no one holds the opinion that this is not painting.

TS: INA/GRM vs. IRCAM

thanks for yr posts, drew, i think you managed to state some of the questions i was having trouble articulating. interesting that those rauschenberg white paintings should come up - in "sonic boom", there's a cage anecdote that mentions those works, he talked about the "hypersensitivity" of the paintings, and saw in them the same impossibility of stillness and void that he experiences in the anechonic chamber (cage's logic: looking at the paintings you might be able, from looking at the shadows on the works or examining the kind of light reflecting off them, to tell if the gallery was crowded or what time of day it was)(his experience isn't quite about the materiality of the paint itself, or at least that's secondary)

i do think pangolino makes an interesting point - that there are plenty of 'sound art' pieces that don't seem to treat self-criticality as an essential mode (though here again i think i've given a bad account of labelle's "acoustical" - if you look at the text, read the paragraphs subtitled "language", "space" and "the body", they deal with some of the theoretical examples you posed in yr question ("someone telling a story in an unusual voice", "sounds that sound like they've come from from a place that they couldn't have") and find that they *do* take sound as their subject, in a way that music doesn't necessarily.

The 'music' / 'sound art' distinction is very useful for talking about and discussing the work. Perhaps not so much for making it. Over the last fifty years there's been an increasingly permeable border between the disciplines, even as the discourse is stepping up to contain it. Some people who would have a problem calling Alvin Lucier's 'Still and Moving Lines of Silence in Families of Hyperbolas' a piece of music might be more comfortable calling it 'sound art' (even though it's played with musical instruments) but I think less and less people will have this problem in the future.

There's a great Chris Cutler quote arguing for the distinction I'll find soon, but here's a bit from Trevor Wishart's 'On Sonio Art' (also heavily recommended, and Amazon has sample bits of it online):

One essential aim of this book is to widen the field of musical debate. One problem I have had in my own musical career is the rejection by some musicians and musicologists of my work on the grounds that 'it is not music'. To avoid getting into semantic quibbles, I have therefore entitled this book 'On Sonic Art' and wish to answer the question what is, and what is not, 'sonic art'. We can begin by saying that sonic art includes music and electro-acoustic music. At the same time, however, it will cross over into areas which have been categorized distinctly as 'text-sound' and as 'sound-effects'. Nevertheless, focus will be on the structure and structuring of sounds themselves. I personally feel there is no longer any way to draw a clear distinction between these areas, This is why I have chosen the title 'On Sonic Art' to encompass the arts of organizing sound-events in time. This, however, is merely a convenient fiction for those who cannot bear to see the use of the word 'music' extended. For me, all these areas fall within the category I call 'music'.

(and, uh, no pressure, but if yr up for finding that cutler quite sometime soon, it might be quite a help)

(c) 1996 Harwood Academic Publishers edition

the Cutler quote is from the introduction of the Sound by Artists book, which is at a friend's house... I'll post it but it may be a while.

from the introduction of Sound By Artists, written by Dan Lander, quoting Cutler from 'Editorial Afterword', Re Records Quarterly, Vol.2, No. 3 (London, 1988)

But if, suddenly, all sound is 'music,' then by definition, there can be no such thing as sound that is not music. The word music becomes meaningless, or rather it means 'sound'. But 'sound' already means that. And when the word 'music' has been long minted and nurtured to refer to a particular activity in respect of sound -- namely its conscious and deliberate organization within a definite aesthetic and tradition -- I can see no convincing argument at this late stage for throwing these useful limitations into the dustbin...

TS: Chris Cutler vs Bear

I heard some of this today

http://www.donatus-subaqua.de/

The speakers were set up in pairs so each pair had a sweet stereo spot with a different track playing in each ear, not imposingly loud but just the right volume to draw you in and make you chase the details. It was lush tbh. Worth checking him out if you ever come across his stuff.

This reminds me - anyone in LA: Steve Roden's 20-year retrospective is up at the Armory in Pasadena and is well worth checking out. Sound pieces, paintings, video, and sculpture.

http://www.armoryarts.org/

Hey folks in SoCal - wanted to give you all a heads up that there is an exhibition opening in a couple weeks at Chapman University in Orange County that is co-curated by Lawrence English (room40) and Robert Crouch (touch), Energy Fields: Vibrations of the Pacific. It's not entirely a sound art show but there will be a heavy presence, including a major work by Steve Roden, an anechoic chamber from David Haines & Joyce Hinterding, and a sound piece from Minaru Sato, among others. The show runs Sept 15 - Jan 19.

There's also going to be some other events in October happening in LA proper including performances by Annea Lockwood, William Basinski, Bethan Kellough, and Ellen Fullman & Teresa Wong. Lots of really great Sound work in LA this fall!

Sick