Sound Art Installation Research Articles

Using soundscape simulation to evaluate compositions for a public space sound installationa).

While urban sound management often focuses on sound as a nuisance, soundscape research suggests that proactive design approaches involving sound art installations can enhance public space experience. Nevertheless, there is no consensus on a methodology to inform the composition of sound installations through soundscape evaluation, and little research on the effect of composition strategies on soundscape evaluation. The present study is part of a research-creation collaboration around the design of a permanent sound installation in an urban public space in Paris (Niches Acoustiques by Nadine Schütz). We report on a laboratory study involving the evaluation of composition sketches prior to the deployment of the installation on-site. Participants familiar with the public space (N = 20) were exposed to Higher-Order Ambisonics recordings of the site, to which compositions of the sound installation pertaining to different composition strategies were added using a soundscape simulation tool. We found three principal components relevant for evaluating and comparing sound installation sketches: pleasantness, familiarity and variety. Further, all composition sketches had a significant effect on the soundscape's familiarity and variety, and the effect of the compositions on these two components was stronger when composition strategies involved abstract sounds (sounds which were not clearly identifiable).

Revisiting young masculinities through a sound art installation: What really counts?

What Really Counts? was a sound art installation created in 2019 through a collaboration between a sociologist and a multidisciplinary artist, working with in-depth interviews with young men recorded as part of a British feminist social research project in 1990, exploring sexualities and the threat of HIV/AIDS. In this article, we describe the evolution and staging of the sound art installation project, situating it within interdisciplinary literatures on the use of sociological archives and reanimation of analogue media in a digital age. Working within a fractured tradition of curated sociology, we consider the potential of interdisciplinary collaboration for refreshing sociological analytic practice, revealing the unrealised potential of archived data sets and utilising temporal displacement as a generative analytic strategy for feeling history. We are working with a 30-year time span characterised by a stretching of intergenerational experience in relation to expectations for and mediation of sex/gender. The project attempts to realise the potential for an experimental sociological practice through the staging of open-ended past–present encounters.

Space shaping in the design process for creative coding: a case study in media multiplicities

ABSTRACT This paper describes the design process for The Mind at Work, a light and sound art installation using networked devices, as a case study in working creatively with complex and unknown technological systems. The art installation evoked the development of a reusable framework for making scalable, re-configurable, audiovisual systems, while creating a specific artwork for a gallery exhibition. The development process was observed systematically to understand how creative coders navigate the challenge of integrating the technical and aesthetic considerations simultaneously. Building on existing design literature, the research is centred on an activity we call space shaping: setting up an environment to create tools for exploration. We consider critical points in the design process which affect how space shaping takes place.

Live Coding Outside, Live Coding Inside: Listening, participation and walking

This article is a text on the encounter of live coding with soundscape, soundart installation and soundwalking. This combination involves leaving the studio or a stage for live coding outside or moving to a participatory event inside a gallery, as in the case of an art installation. The article presents four cases of live coders and artists who have worked with this mixture. To understand how these artists combine live coding with these sound practices, I interviewed them and observed their works and performances in videos posted on internet platforms. The article shows that live coding sound, commonly performed within a concert space, can happen in listening, participation or walking contexts. The cases explore the sound of nature and the city to integrate it into the live coding practice of each artist. This shows that live coding can be expanded, combined or hybridised with other sound practices and establish a dialogue between different communities.

Driven by Data

Artist Mare Hirsch is driven by data, but it wasn't always that way. After initially studying both classical and jazz guitar, Hirsch gravitated to music composition because it offered more of an authorship role. She scored films and created sound-art installations, always in search of ways for audiences to experience sound anywhere besides the concert hall stage.

Gapassipi

Gapassipi

Informing sound art design in public space through soundscape simulation

Urban sound management often amounts to reducing sound levels with the underlying assumption of sound/noise as a nuisance. However, a reduction in sound level does not necessarily lead to a more pleasant auditory experience, especially in urban public spaces where vibrancy can be sought after. A proactive design approach that accounts for the human experience of sound environment is needed to improve the quality of urban spaces. Recent studies in soundscape research suggest that added sound and particularly sound art installations can have a positive influence on public space evaluations. Yet, the role of added sounds in urban context remains understudied and there is no existing method to date to inform sound art composition in public space through soundscape simulation. We present here a research-creation collaboration around the design of a permanent sound installation in an urban public space in Paris: Nadine Schütz's Niches Acoustiques. We report on a series of listening tests involving High-Order Ambisonic soundscape simulations of different prototypes to inform the sound artist's composition in order to optimize the quality of public space experience in the presence of the sound installation.

Experiencing Sound Installations: A conceptual framework

We propose a conceptual framework for describing and documenting sound installations from a visitor’s point of view. In the form of a taxonomy, the framework includes four complementary perspectives: sound sources, sound design approaches, visiting modalities and visual aspects. Its elaboration was informed by a review of contemporary sound installations in Quebec as well as a literature review on conceptual and theoretical frameworks on sound art and sound installations. Compared with existing frameworks, the taxonomy is useful for describing and comparing sound installations across meaningful perspectives from a visitor’s stance. To illustrate the potential benefits of the taxonomy and the diversity of installations it can portray, we provide a comparative analysis of four contemporary sound installations from different perspectives. We conclude with the use of this taxonomy for documentation purposes.

Review of Contemporary Sound Installation Practices in Québec

Continuing a trend of publications investigating sound art within a specific geographical context, this paper proposes an original view of the sound installation practice in Québec. This study is part of a research project aiming at building new theoretical and practical tools for the documentation of such artworks. In this paper we present the outcomes of the first phase and its connection with the bigger picture of the project, which is the questioning of the relevance of spatial audio recordings with six degrees of freedom (6DoF) for mediating the capture of knowledge relating to the sensory experience of a work. During the first phase, we developed a conceptual descriptive framework based on a mixed-methods approach, top-down and bottom-up, consisting in a systematic review of literature paralleled with a categorization of contemporary sound art production in Québec based on publicly available documentation. This process led to a formal and quantitative depiction of the Québec scene, which aims to guide both the selection of case studies for the next phases but also to be part of the conceptual tools for investigating the sensory experience of these works. This quantitative depiction of the scene will thus foster a qualitative investigation of the sensory experience of sound art installations and the knowledge that may be lost in standard written documentation practice with an original methodological framework.

Crying Sea, The Sound Installation: Artistic Considerations for Coexistence between Human and Technology

As the discourse on Anthropocene grows, this exploratory research investigates the interrelationship and interconnectivity between humanity and technology by analyzing a sound art installation created by the author. <italic>Crying Sea</italic> is a sound installation that uses plastic wastes collected from the shore to create symbolic narratives and artistic experience connecting humans, objects, and nature through interactive digital technology. In this installation, the audiences are guided to walk over the wastes, and the sounds created by the footsteps are recorded in real-time, which then are distorted and amplified into disturbing sounds through speakers filling up the room. In analyzing this artwork, three theories from technological, philosophical, and ecological backgrounds were used; specifically, Bernard Stiegler’s pharmakon theory, Dona Haraway’s cyborg manifesto, and Timothy Morton’s dark ecology theory. A common factor revealed from all three theories by analyzing the <italic>Crying Sea</italic> is that humans, technologies, and all other entities within nature are interconnected and resonated. The awareness of this recursive relationship allows us to consider sustainable balancing.

Dead voices and lost sounds: an imagined sonic history

A project description of a sound art installation and interactive performance presented as part of the Up Close Festival in New York City in the winter of 2019/2020. The article is authored by the creator and director of the piece, Adrienne Kapstein. Created for an all-age audience, the piece was a unique, relational and socially engaged experience that merged sound art, live performance, illusion, technology, and audience participation. Designed to be completed in partnership with members of the community it sought to serve, the piece invited participation from every audience member through multiple and varied means of engagement.

“Auxauralities” : Ears-on 3-D-printed acoustics metamaterials for sound art

Due to unique acoustic properties, acoustic metamaterials (AMMs) find many engineering applications in industrial or military sectors. However, as a result of their complex behavior and since they are generally unknown to the non-scientists, AMMs are not integrated into the thinking of daily auditory culture and sound environments. AMMs' potentially speculative effects on sound environments and audio cultures could be communicated and investigated through art. To fully seize this opportunity, there is a need for Arts and Sciences sympoiesis as a way of thinking, creating, designing and experientially testing audible-range AMMs. Since engineering AMMs require considerable expertise in physics and additive manufacturing, it is not easy for non-acousticians to explore such materials. Therefore, an “ears-on” audible experiential approach was developed. To do so, the presented work is a co-creation process for developing tools for sound art. Two approaches were investigated as sound art prototyping tools. First, an auralization process is presented to perform acoustic simulations and virtually hear the results beforehand. A second approach uses modular 3-D-printed resonators and crystals for the rapid improvement of the hands-on and “ears-on” iterative design of a sound art installation: “Auxauralities” [Work supported by Fonds Recherche Québec Audace, 2020-AUDC271071].

Research at Rome's Centro Ricerche Musicali on Interactive and Adaptive Installations and on Augmented Instruments

Abstract Established in 1988 by composers Laura Bianchini and Michelangelo Lupone, the Centro Ricerche Musicali (CRM) in Rome was officially recognized in 1990 as a Music Research Center by the Ministry for University Education and Scientific and Technological Research. The Center focuses on musical production in relation to new technologies, in order to create a continual interaction among musical language, scientific thought, and technological resources. The staff at CRM, comprising musicians, technicians, visual artists, architects, information technology specialists, engineers, and researchers, aim to promote study of the aesthetic, analytical, and scientific aspects of music. In the beginning, research at CRM concerned the design and development of specific hardware devices for live electronics and composition, such as the Fly10 (1983–1985) and Fly30 (1990) systems. Subsequent studies on a physical model for the bow-and-string system in 1997 gave rise to the development of virtual musical instruments. From 1999 onwards, other areas of research have included interactivity and adaptivity applied to musical forms, the development of specific technologies for sound art installations and sculptural–musical works, and augmented instruments such as the Feed-Drum, SkinAct, WindBack, and ResoFlute. This article presents a brief history of CRM and some artistic productions by composers working at the Center.

Listening to Indigenous Knowledge of the Land in Two Contemporary Sound Art Installations

This essay addresses the silences and soundings of Rebecca Belmore's (Anishinaabe) and Julie Nagam's (Anishinaabe/Métis/German/Syrian) sound art, which reflects their environmentalism and profound commitment to Indigenous ways of knowing, making, and listening. Working at the intersection of sound art and politics, the two perform sonic interventions into settler colonial spaces—the National Parks system and the gallery, respectively. Belmore's Wave Sound (2017) and Nagam's Our future is in the land: If we listen to it (2017) illustrate how their sound art gravitates toward the ecological and considers what healthy and unhealthy relationships between humans and the nonhuman world—plants, animals, resources—sound like. Belmore and Nagam introduce marginalized perspectives and voices to address the problematic authority of whiteness that conspicuously dominates the discourse on music, sound, and environment—a relatively homogenous and exclusionary artistic, technological, and scientific discussion.

Dossier: Cross-Media Slowness

Dossier:Cross-Media Slowness Katja Kwastek and Erin La Cour For this dossier, we selected six pieces that elaborate upon artistic practice and the relationality of slowness. We begin with two considerations of measurement and time that call into question our anthropocentric views, and offer new avenues for exhibitions, in terms of the "here" and "now" of mediation. In "Phase to Phase: On Oceanic Oscillations, Measurements, Predictions, and Chronographs," DAVID GAUTHIER offers a reading of two of his recent sound art and video installations. In exploring the operations of instrumentation used to measure and predict tide and wave oscillations, his work questions both the move from measurements to predictions as well as what could be termed the perspectives of the metrological machines themselves. HANS FIDOM's "Coping with Cage: On ORGAN2/ASLSP, Listening, and Music-Making" also engages in a consideration of slowness in terms of machinic possibilities. In exploring just how fast or slow the piece could—and should—be played, what comes to the fore is that rather than having an answer to "how to cope with Cage," we should always engage with the question itself. The dossier continues with the documentation of two performances from the ASAP/Amsterdam symposium. Adding to clocked time the presence of the past and a multiplicity of timescales, the performances work to further elucidate the layeredness of slowness. In "SCORE for Wavelength. An Homage to Michael Snow," Alexandra Karl offers a condensation of a recording of Snow's forty-five-minute Wavelength to twenty minutes, during which time she presented critiques of his film and technique, alongside quotations from interviews and audience reactions. In effect, Karl's performance served both to speed up a very slow zoom and to slow down its mediation—both by her in the present and by interviews, reviews, and her students in the past. Greatly expanding the timescales presented, Jeremiah Day's "The chair remains empty / But the [End Page 485] place is set," with accompaniment by Bart de Kroon, invited the audience to ponder the political connections between disparate times and places, including Istanbul during the Gezi protests, Kant's Berlin versus Arendt's Berlin, and the first town hall meetings in New England in the seventeenth century. While his rhythmic repetitions of movements, sounds, and slideshow images cannot be directly experienced in the transcript as presented herein, his way of choreographing through language is evident, and his words and stills forcefully call to mind the clocking of them all. The final two dossier pieces further speak to how artistic intervention can effectively mediate the experience of space and time. In "Hasten Slowly: On the Perception of Time and Space in Ian Hamilton Finlay's Little Sparta," Ekaterina Kochetkova offers Finlay's landscape architecture as a productive engagement with slowness. She explores the cross-historical dimension that Finlay sought to engender in his garden near Edinburgh by having his visitors move back and forth between antiquity, the World Wars, and the present day through a demarcation of tiny details, framing vistas and other points for pause, and careful placement of plaques with Latin phrases, cited poetry, and wordplay. The experience of the walk Kochetkova relays thus becomes more than a meditative experience of calm and renewal—it makes clear Finlay's, and perhaps our own, preoccupation with speed and mediation. Maria Fusco's "Then speech is not an impediment, a sort of brake on the wheel of intellect but like a second wheel running parallel with it on the same axle," also offers an engagement with the mediation of time through artistic intervention. In her excerpt from her unpublished novella, Sailor, she not only develops a practice of slowing down her writing process by scoring the Belfast dialect but also, in so doing, forces the reader to slow down the reading process in order to decipher, pronounce, and thereby hear the dialect. Her delocalizing of dialect—from the aural to the textual, as well as from the writer to the nonlocal reader—raises further questions of labor, patience, and intent. —Katja Kwastek and Erin La Cour [End Page 486] Copyright © 2019 Johns Hopkins University Press

Updating the History of Sound Art: Additions, Clarifications, More Questions

The author takes a close look at the origins of the terms sound art and sound installation, identifying additional historical sources and addressing misconceptions about their origins. The author then focuses on two early sound works by Max Neuhaus, a sound art pioneer who is frequently said to be the creator of the first sound installation.

Sonic Kayaks: Environmental monitoring and experimental music by citizens.

The Sonic Kayak is a musical instrument used to investigate nature and developed during open hacklab events. The kayaks are rigged with underwater environmental sensors, which allow paddlers to hear real-time water temperature sonifications and underwater sounds, generating live music from the marine world. Sensor data is also logged every second with location, time and date, which allows for fine-scale mapping of water temperatures and underwater noise that was previously unattainable using standard research equipment. The system can be used as a citizen science data collection device, research equipment for professional scientists, or a sound art installation in its own right.

Curating the aural cultures of the Battery: Soundwalking, auditory tourism and interactive locative media sound art

Inside Outside Battery is a mobile media sound art installation for smartphone technologies that uses global positioning system (GPS) locative software to narrate walking visitors through the Battery, a heritage neighbourhood of St. John’s (Newfoundland, Canada). Auditory tourists, or soundwalkers, come to know the aural cultures of the Battery through the dynamic interactions of sound and place using site- and time-specific archival materials, stories, soundscapes, and expressive culture sourced from the Battery that play alongside real-time encounters with the physical and sonic materiality of the Battery. Employing practice-based ethnography, this article examines how site- and time-specific soundscape interactive documentary technologies engage socioenvironmental knowledge and foster a sense of place attachment for visitors to the Battery.

Creating a Coral Symphony: Sound Art and Sonification

There is a rich history of artists representing the visible world through imagery. What of the invisible? What if you could harness hidden voices of the natural environment? Artistic sonification is an emerging artistic endeavour at the intersection of mathematics and music, which sees big data transformed into sound. This paper describes the background and development of Coral Symphony - a Sound Art installa-tion unveiling voices from the Great Barrier Reef, Australia. Installation constituent materials evolved from the sonification of ecological data over twenty years, supplemented with field recordings.

Sonic Placemaking: Three approaches and ten attributes for the creation of enduring urban sound art installations

This article investigates the approaches and attributes of publicly situated sound installations which have achieved the status of permanency, and have attracted ongoing local, and even international, visitors. The article draws on international fieldwork in 2015 that documented several enduring sound installations in the United States, UK and Europe. Through an inductive process including listening exercises, sound recordings, observations and interviews, the analysis identifies three approaches to creating sound installations and ten attributes of operative sound installations. It is argued that by encouraging public listening, the discussed sound installations successfully establish a sensory connection between people and their environments. By extension, it is argued that this emergent sense of place is commensurate with the installations’ capacity to augment a pre-existing ‘spirit of place’. These findings culminate in a sonic placemaking tool for situating sound art installations in urban spaces. It is suggested that urban planners and designers can apply the presented sonic placemaking tool to augment a site’s spirit of place, thereby affecting new experiences in everyday urban life.