Category: Introduction to Sound Arts

This blog will be about a bit of what was said during the book presentations and a bit of debating ideas that came up frequently.

Personally, the presentation I found the most interesting was the last one on the book “The Fundamentals of Sonic Art & Sound Design”. This was mainly because the 2 people who gave the presentation were funny which made the amount of information that they were giving easily digestible. That book also mentioned quite a bit on coding and such, which is a field I’m quite interested in (as is evident in the blog post in which some background research for my assessment is featured).

It was mentioned that sound arts are usually relegated to a subordinate role when it comes to multi-media pieces and that the book was trying to highlight times where sound art acted as the “main actor” in multi-media pieces. As someone who taught as a fine artist for most of his life and has a great interest in film and performance, trying to navigate how to make sound the focus in my multi-media pieces has been a hard one. Personally, I’ve always thought that art shouldn’t be experienced in only one dimension or only through one sense as humans don’t experience life through one sense or in one dimension. This statement was really usually for me to hear at the time because it did cause changes in how I perceived my sonic thinking and doing assessment.

Other than the fact that all the books were written with as much jargon as one could fit, something else that came up constantly was eurocentrism and how it was perceived, in itself, to be a bad thing. Why is it wrong for Europeans to make eurocentric literature? How can we diminish their experiences just because other cultures are not properly represented? The problem with any centrism is when it replaces other centrism (other than the fact that it’s not a holistic view of whatever it’s trying to talk about), not the act of being centric in the first place. In fact, I would argue that centrism existing is the reason we can talk about different cultures having different viewpoints on sound art, making it actually a good thing. What I find very interesting is how we can complain when a text is eurocentric, in terms of history and views, yet it’s actually the most relevant viewpoint to those who are European as it is our history, the foundation on which European sound arts sit upon. Just because there are bad parts with the fact that the European standpoint is what is taught in other continents (this is technically an assumption), one what be quick to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

In the Blink of an Ear: Toward a Non-Cochlear Sonic Art was the book that I was assigned. For a quick review, I enjoyed it greatly as it was interesting to learn about different ontologies (but mostly just the same one said in different words) of sound art; really trying to understand the ideas put forth and weaving aspects of those ideas into my own understanding of art and sound art was the best part.

What will be on this post is just a transcription of the part that I gave in my group’s presentation.

“In the blink of an Ear toward a non-cochlear sonic art, the title of Seth Kim-Cohen book is supposedly in reference to Marcel Duchamp’s dismissal of modern art being purely visual and his call for an “anti-retinal” approach to painting. Cohen proposes something similar but in the context of sound art. The notion of an “anti-retinal” approach or non-cochlear approach to art is highlighted in Clement Greenberg’s piece “The Situation at the Moment” which was published in 1948. Greenberg talked about how public interest in abstract painting was waning at the time and proposes it was due to the obsession artists had for the visual and the lack of meaning abstract painting had outside of its form. Greenberg argued that art at the time could only survive or stay relevant through advancing the meaning behind the artworks, and Seth Kim-Cohen argues that sound art needs to go through the same process of advancing the subject matter on which we base our sound art around.

When I read this, I agreed with a lot of the points it was making. The form of a sound piece is important but at the end of the day the meaning or topic that underpins a piece is what drives or guides the subjective experience one would have when listening to a sound piece. It also made me think about the tango between abstraction and generalisation that I sure have come up for all of us when making sound art. The more we abstract our art to make it more sonically interesting, the harder it is for people to grasp what’s actually being told through it.

Or at least that I thought before reading how Greenberg depicts the experience of an artwork from its conception to this finality. He breaks this down into 3 sections. Content, subject matter, and form. Content refers to the initial inspiration that motivates an artist to make a piece, being like the first experience of an artwork, but also refers to the impact or impression the piece leaves on the spectator, which is the last experience of an artwork. Content is expressed through the 2 channels, subject matter and form. Subject matter in Greenberg’s framework is what the work is perceived to be about, a subjective interpretation, and the form is how the subject matter is organised and represented, the objective reality.

So, why is this important, why did I talk about it at all. Well, during the first few weeks, we discussed the question “what is sound arts” and I’ve been reflecting on what art is in an age where technology has raised the baseline of quality in art. In the blink of an ear has a fantastic quote from Greenberg in its first real chapter “In One Ear, Out the Other” that kind of answers or underpins what I was thinking out and what I’m going to end on. “The unspecifiability of its ‘content’ is what constitutes art as art.”

What I said was actually slightly different, but basically, my idea for my part was to come at it as if I was teaching something from the book instead of just reviewing the book. In retrospect, was executed poorly and was god awfully boring, but nevertheless, it was interesting when I read it.

This blog is about some of the research I’m doing for my SDT assignment. I thought it would be appropriate as a part of the ISA blogs as it is mainly about Pierre Schaffer and the audio effect techniques of his time, and Schaffer comes up a lot in what we do. On top of that, there’s just a bit of pure data, or just a GRM patch I have from time ago.

For my SDT assignment, I wanted to research more about Pierre Schaffer and the audio effect techniques that he could use in the 1940s-1960s. This is because I want to use Musique Concrete and those audio effects as the main foundation for the piece I’m creating. What I want to do with my piece right now is basically create something in the style of Musique Concrete but is actually completely opposed ideologically as I love to experience sound not necessarily for its sound but because of the context in which it was created.

My main resource was an article called “A History of Audio Effects” by Thomas Wilmering and others. After reading it I was under the impression that I could only use delays, pitch-shifting, time-shifting, and static panning. I wanted to recreate a universal phonogene in pure data but I lacked a lot of the knowledge I needed to do that, so with the help of one of my old tutors, we created one, but it was mostly them guiding me on what to do.

It was basically a sampler that would constantly loop the sample, and I could edit the pitch in real-time. It wasn’t anything you couldn’t do in a DAW, but it was fun to manipulate some of the recordings I had in such a simplified way.

A lot of the artists we talk about in the weekly “Sound Art in this Context” have something to do with Pierre Schaffer, and after it came up with Gutai and then linking Gutai to one of my favourite artists, I thought this research was the best thing to do.

In this lesson, it was more of a self-study/research deal and I was mostly focused on Gutai and Group Ongaku.

Gutai or Gutai Art Association was basically a movement that tried to get away and differ itself from musique concrete by being interactive, less manipulated and less composed. An artist by the name of Atsuko Tanaka was a part of Gutai from 1955 to 1965, in which she made probably her 2 most influential pieces, “Bell”, and “Electric Dress”. Bell was the first of her sound art pieces, despite being self-described as a painting. Bell was an interactive piece in which a series of bells were hooked up to each other so that when one would ring one, the rest would be played sequentially. Something of note throughout the 1950s and 60s is the performance aspect of Tanaka’s work. In its first outing in an exhibition held by Gutai, viewers were apparently quite timid in ringing the bells (only ringing bells once) and would refrain from interacting with the piece in its entirety.

From Bells’s interactive nature through the viewer/listener ringing the bells themselves, to her performance/film piece ‘Round on Sand’, performance and diegetic sound play a key role in her work in making it digestible for the public to view as the simplification of ideas and form makes her works understandable on a surface level. However, I am probably wrong about the idea of it being digestible for Atsuko Tanaka was a part of Gutai, an avant-garde group, meaning that her work was probably pushing the boundaries of attitudes of art during the time. So while it could be seen as digestible now, it was most probably extremely confusing to witness in 1955.

An artist that I’ve actually researched before that could have been inspired by Gutai is Yuki Suzuki. With a lot of his installations, interactivity plays a major role, usually being quite similar to Bell in the way that the viewer is at the forefront of the creation of an art piece. An example of that would be the 2019 installation at the Turner Contemporary “The Welcome Chrous” that transformed lyrics live using an AI.

Group Ongaku is about rejecting 12 tone music, which uses a lot of tape manipulation and non-western music as the main dogma (it was founded and started being active in 1960). I didn’t have time to look into Group Ongaku during the lesson, but as I do have a great interest in tape manipulation and Pierre Schaffer, I’m sure I’ll look more into them at a later date.

The Toop and Parkinson article “Unfinished Business: A Conversation on Sound Art in the United Kingdom” was quite an interesting article to read which mainly touches on things that helped develop sound art in the UK and thus common characteristics found in sound art from the UK.

One of the pieces that I found interesting was Gilbert and George’s “Singing Sculpture” from 1969. I found this work highly funny as the stilted performance was comical but reading the context of the piece in Toop and Parkinson’s does make me think about the temporal differences between my generation and the wartime generation. Examples being how my reaction would be quite “surface level” in comparison to someone from the wartime generation and how the live-performance aspect of the piece is not that novel/radical by today’s standards compared to the 1960s.

Singing Sculpture – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsuHpi2gcGY&ab_channel=CatherineHeard

Another aspect of the article that I found particularly interesting was the part about the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Something I can never really understand is how much of a cultural monolith the BBC was in the past, which usually leads to me to downplay their effect on the development of electronic music, sound arts and music in general. I wish I could listen to the radio play “Prometheus Unbound” but I couldn’t find the audio on the internet.

The last part of the article that stood out for me was the part about the Austrian composer Anton Webern. Many of the compositions for the orchestra I found of his reminded me of music/sound for film as it felt quite disjointed and had such a clear narrative that lends itself to cinema.
One example of this being “Variations for Orchestra, Op. 30” (1940) – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAQdEMYTdEI&ab_channel=BartjeBartmans

I missed out a lot when reading the article as I am still finding new things as I am referencing it for this blog post, so I know the discussion on it is something to look forward to.

What is sound art? Well, that was the main point of contention during this first session. My initial response to the question was that sound arts was “the unconventional expression of sound,” which refers to how sound arts can be too general of a term when classifying sound art and how the classification of sound art would change as disciplines within it become more mainstream/develop.

At one point in the session, many people in the class got to share how they would define sound art and quite a few of them were interesting to ponder on.

One of these said definitions was “Sound art is music but with fewer boundaries” – I felt like a definition of sound art in comparison to music missed an obvious distinction between the two in how music is mainstream and is the biggest and most popular sound-based field. Another thing I thought about this definition was that sound art may not be less restrictive in comparison because music overall doesn’t actually have many boundaries at all, other than it’s mainly sonic. There are myriad genres of music that are expressions of culture around the world. While it is easy to believe that music is more restrictive than sound art as we are based in the UK where a certain timbre of pop music is prevalent, when genres like noise music exist that is reminiscent of stereotypical sound art, it is hard to make such a clear cut definition when the reality isn’t.

Another definition was “In comparison music, sound art tries less to be “pleasing” to people. It’s more about the concept or idea” – This definition is one I could agree with at this point in time; however, where I think it falls short is in how it’s only a contemporary definition and not one that could be used outside of this “era of sound art”. I would argue that if people were exposed and conditioned to sound art more, it would then become more pleasing to the ear even though the content hasn’t necessarily changed, meaning sound art now could be music in the future as it has become more pleasing to the ear. While the logic I used is quite flawed, it is quite interesting to think about, and I believe a better definition of music compared to sound art could be “Music is usually made to be pleasing to more people or for a certain group of people”. But then that definition has its own potholes. The notation that sound art is more about the concept or idea is actually practically the same for music in general, especially for non-mainstream music.

“Art is made by humas intentionally.” I 100% agree with this statement. Art made without any intention is not art, and should not be seen as art in my eyes. If art could be made un-intentionally, it would be made without meaning, and art without meaning is not art, for art is also the expression of an idea/concept through abstraction in any medium, or at least that was what I was taught. Things can be artistic even if it was not made to be art, because even through mundane things/natural things, emotions and feelings can be imprinted onto people. My problem is when things that are not meaningful in process or form are given meaning to say that they are pieces of art. I need to rewrite and refine this line of reasoning, but I don’t think that something devoid of meaning can be art, nor do I believe that something that was not made to be art can become art by being attributed as such.

This definition also leans into the fact that art cannot be everything, as there would be no reason to classify art as is if it was always art.
If art was everything possible, how would art ever be novel or interesting, original or different? Simply, why would art exist in the first place if it was everything? Everything with or without meaning, made as art and made as not art, made intentionally and by complete accident. Terms and labels in life are made to restrict and differentiate what is and what isn’t the term, and if nothing isn’t art, nothing can be actual art. I won’t lie, all said in this last paragraph was quite cyclical and redundant to mention, but I do think something to take away is that maybe it is better if definitions like these are more exclusive, more elitest, so that we don’t run the risk of these terms losing all meaning and thus miscategorisating different things.