Sound Art Practice Research Articles

Sonic Electromagnetism

The author describes their sound art practice, which uses the electromagnetic field (EM) to explore concepts of the body toward a feminist and pro-trans future. This practice stands in contrast to hidden consumer “black box” culture and mediated digital telepresence. Three specific art projects are explored that fuse visual design, printed circuitry, and interactivity to build critical space for participatory exploration. The author explores concepts of the body in relation to spatialized sound and queer phenomenology of sound. Lastly, the author suggests that the creative exploration of sonic electromagnetism is a larger movement by a disparate community of artists who aim to challenge existing systems of power. In their exploration of the electromagnetic field, the author argues that these artists strive to harness a new source of empowerment and spirit.

ELEKTROAKUSTİK MÜZİK VE SESSEL SANATLARDA ÖZGÜRLEŞTİRİCİ BİR FAKTÖR OLARAK TEKNOLOJİ

This research aims to investigate the influence of technology on expanding the sound palette used in the musical context. In order to conclude, this article focuses on how technology has shaped electroacoustic music and sound art trends since the 1950s. The main focus is technology's impact on the relationship between sound and expanded musical boundaries. Considering music history, technology’s involvement in arts, its influence in music occurred in a short time compared to other movements. Technology accessibility strongly influences its role in shaping musical styles, artistic motivation, and sound crafting methods. For instance, recording technology can alter the identity of sound within the musical context. Also, the methods, equipment, and motivation shape technology's impact on artists' creative processes and acoustic output. In order to explain the influence of technology, a historical approach has been used to discuss the active studios’ similarities, differences and influences over each other and further. The influences of technology and approaches to sound were discussed in four parameters under accessibility. Methods influenced by different artistic practices, their uses in musical practices and their reflections in current artistic practices are also explained under the examined parameters. To conclude, the paper briefly explores the cyclical shifts between retrospective and techno-determinism in electroacoustic music and sound art practices. Under the lens of futurism and modernism, the impact of electricity’s involvement in music and the trends it created are discussed thoroughly.

Listening and Mediation

This article approaches listening practices and the role of technological mediation within ecological sound art, building on findings through the artistic research practices of the two authors. Through documentation of the authors’ ecological sound art practices of aeolian guitar performance, curation, composition, performance on found objects and field recording, we argue that phenomenological variation is inherent to the use of technology across all these forms of performative responsivity, as well as in the analytical forms of listening enacted through stimulated recall and micro-phenomenology. By unpacking the agencies at play in ecological sound art, we discuss how these artistic practices afford “unexpected ways” (Arteaga, 2017, p. 25) to knowledge. The article thus attempts to provide insight into human and non-human agencies at play in phenomenological approaches to ecological sound art and technological mediation, activated through listening.

Topologies of air: Shona Illingworth’s art practice and the ethics of air

In her video and sound art practice, artist Shona Illingworth has extensively engaged with atmospheric environments as they are experienced physically and affectively. In the multi-screen and sound installation, Topologies of Air (2021), Illingworth addresses the conditions and discourses that define today’s perception and understandings of airspaces. This article closely examines Topologies of Air and further relates it to Illingworth’s art research practice, outlining key features and methodologies to argue that Illingworth’s decentralized approach to airspaces is rooted in an ethics of air that fosters empathic understanding. This is congruent with the aim of proposing a new human right on the freedom to live without threats from above put forward through the Airspace Tribunal, an integral component of Illingworth’s project that she has developed in collaboration with human right expert, Nick Grief.

Sonification of weather data as a non-human-centric artistic approach

Background - In the mid-20th century, the emergence of sound studies demonstrated a shift of research interest in sonic practitioners. This field gains its prevalence by expanding the boundaries of prevailing conception through proposing alternative creative approaches in sound art practices. Methods – Two methods were presented – listening and sounding to promote creative sound making. The first method, listening involves soundwalking and recording sound from the external environments. These recordings were then re-evaluated and post-processed in audio editing software. The second method, sounding involves the creation of a weather data sonification system in Pure Data environment, in which the perceptual experience from the first method was taken into consideration. Result – First method enables the genesis of creative idiosyncrasies, such as preferences and ideas through the sonic perception of environmental events. In this process, noise and weather were identified as environmental components that share similar sensible qualities. Thus, noise is a prevalent medium that inspires the creation of sound generators in the sonification system presented in this paper. The sonic output of data sonification reveals an analogical connection between weather data and sonic parameters, in which changes in data values result in changes in acoustic properties. These outputs deliver different sensibilities based on their data parameters; sonification of temperature data might suggest an alarming effect to the listener. Conclusion – The proposed methods were intricately linked, suggesting environmental events to be perceived and realized through a non-scientific perspective. By highlighting aesthetic possibilities of environmental components, this paper presents an alternative perspective in contrast with the human-centric worldview through the creation of sonic works.

Hand/Cup/Stone

This article takes a look at notions of agency as experienced by the author in her sound art practice. Primarily a personal reflection on creative practice rather than a theoretical or scholarly piece, the author reviews difference stages of the compositional process and considers where agency lies - with her as composer, with the objects she manipulates, with the electronics that animate those objects, or with the audience / viewers / participants that ultimately experience the work? Landing ultimately on an idea of the agency of imagination, the article also explores ideas of direct, shared, artificial, prosthetic and relational agency. The case study most consistently referred to is Ficarra's work Piano Bench Variations, which premiered at 1078 Gallery in Chico California in January 2019 as part of the Broken Open collaborative exhibit.

Crash, boom, bang

Audience participation is a prominent thread running through much of sound art practice, yet it remains largely absent from the sound art scholarship. In this article, I argue that the most widespread methodologies employed in sound art research – roughly split into the phenomenological branch and the object-oriented branch – are ill equipped to tackle the questions of sociality and participation. Instead, I offer a framework for the study of participation in sound art – and, more broadly, for sound aesthetics in general – rooted in the pragmatist tradition. My starting point is John Dewey’s conceptualization of an artwork as an aesthetic experience developing in cycles of doing and undergoing – a structure, he claims, present in both the creative process and the reception of artworks, putting them on equal footing. I then expand this notion by turning to the contemporary pragmatist trends in creativity studies, ANT and affordance theory, introducing the concepts of we-creativity, mediation and affordance. The second half of the article focuses specifically on affordance – a relationship between a sound artwork and its audience delimiting and facilitating the possibilities for participation. I discuss the low-level affordances (facilitating elementary action) for creative listening and soundmaking and high-level affordances (facilitating complex behaviors) for creativity, experimentation and connectivity. I conclude that the pragmatist framework allows to go beyond the subject- or object-centeredness of phenomenological or object-oriented methodologies, bringing to the foreground the relational and social character of sound art.

Studio_ L28: From a Socially Engaged Sound Art Practice to an Open Training Ground for Sonic Design Experimentation

This paper reflects the preliminary findings of a PhD research on the spatial politics and potentials of noise and vibration, and the affective or attractive and repulsive power of sonic force. We focus on the public space of a railway area in transformation in Brussels, where sonic conflicts are prevalent. To explore the affordances of a sonic urbanism as critical spatial practice and thus to break free from prevailing modes of urbanism which focus on sonic risk and vibrational nuisance − we constitute a working practice exploiting and nurturing the productive encounters between disciplines such as sound art, urbanism and urban architecture. By setting up an experimental design studio at the KU Leuven Faculty of Architecture, embedded in local auditory culture and in connection to ongoing planning processes, we aimed to facilitate an open learning ground for sonic design experimentation in the development of innovative sonic spatial tools and approaches. The studio was oriented to students of the International Master in Architecture summoned to research the multiple (sonic) vibrations of the L28 railway area, to exploit and contrast these vibrational forces, transforming them to into actions and opportunities. From a critical sonic understanding of urban space, students played and explored a contradictory role compared to the widespread noise control practices, reformulated environments, perimeters and relations of urban phenomena and searched for interactivity with vibrational dynamics that already exist in the territory.

Establishing a Critical Framework for the Appraisal of “Noise” in Contemporary Sound Art with Specific Reference to the Practices of Yasunao Tone, Carsten Nicolai and Ryoji Ikeda

Yasunao Tone, Carsten Nicolai and Ryoji Ikeda are three practitioners representative of electronic music and sound-art practices that emerged in the 1990s where sound materials not normally considered musical, such as digital clicks, glitches and bursts of white noise, are prevalent. It is notable that the origins of this body of work lay outside of the established music institutions of academia and the mainstream popular music industry. Practitioners such as these are often associated with particular record labels including Mille Plateaux or Raster-Noton and attempts to coalesce these practices into a single, unified genre have been made by Cascone (2000), Sangild (2004) and Kelly (2009). These assessments however, tend to critique work mainly in technological terms. In contrast, this thesis draws out deeper philosophical concerns relevant to these practices through a critical analysis of materials produced by and about these practitioners, including commercial releases, works, writings and interviews. What emerges from this is that Heidegger's notion of truth as `revealing' and Derrida's critique of phonocentrism can provide a clearer philosophical framework for a consideration of this work. This framework, by extension could be used to critique other sound art or music practices. Moreover, ideas found in Attali's (1985) telling of economic history through music are applied to these practices in order to argue that the use of materials reflects a wider cultural shift away from the notion of value as something quantified, abstract and intrinsic, predominant since the Age of Enlightenment, towards one concerned with the qualitative, contextual and extrinsic. This is related to Kim-Cohen's (2009) advocacy of a conceptual sound art to argue that noise practices represent forms of practice that challenge both notions of absolute music - music primarily understood 'as a numerical sign system' (Kim-Cohen 2009: 40) - and prevailing political-economic structures.

Acouscenic Listening and Creative Soundwalks: Evoking Memory and Narratives through Soundscape Exploration

Sound art is at the vanguard of contemporary creative practices seeking to establish a platform for meaningful debate on a range of accelerating global environmental crises. This paper explores how the Softday art/science collaboration moved from exploring histories of the natural world in the epoch of the Anthropocene, while engaging in a continuum of public and politicized contestations addressing climate change issues, to a participatory sound art practice that that we call Acouscenic Listening and Creative Soundwalks, which may help to develop a novel frame of understanding of the world.

Unsound Connections: No-Input Synthesis System

One of the ongoing projects developed within the author’s sound-art practice, ‘Unsound Connections’, utilises feedback tones and digital signal processing within a live performance system where crude sounds induced by inappropriate usage of audio equipment are shaped and arranged by software audio effects. The resulting composition is a hybrid of aesthetics, technologies, and methodologies found in electroacoustic music and electronic dance music. Musical terms are used in describing the process by which the composition was created, as opposed to the technical analysis of feedback tones by Knut Aufermann in his dissertation Feedback Processes: an investigation into non-linear electronic music. While that particular paper provides not only a comprehensive technical analysis, but also a cultural reflection on the notion of feedback, it lacks a musical analysis of the resulting material. This paper intends to provide readers with a description of the composed piece in a manner closer to that of an analysis of a musical performance.

Getting Out of the Black Box: analogising the use of computers in electronic music and sound art

The process of creating computer-based music is increasingly being conceived in terms of complex chains of mediations involving composer/performer and computer software interactions that prompt us to reconsider notions of materiality within the context of digital cultures. Recent scholarship has offered particularly useful re-evaluations of computer music software in relation to musical instrumentality. In this article, we contend that given the ubiquitous presence of computer units within contemporary musical practices, it is not simply music software that needs to be reframed as musical instruments, but rather the diverse material strata of machines identified as computers that need to be thought of as instruments within music environments. Specifically, we argue that computers, regardless of their technical specifications, are not only ‘black boxes’ or ‘meta-tools’ that serve to control music software, but are also material objects that are increasingly being used in a wide range of musical and sound art practices according to an ‘analog’ rather than ‘digital’ logic. Through a series of examples implicating both soft and hard dimensions of what constitutes computers, we provide a preliminary survey of practices calling for the need to rethink the conceptual divide between analog and digital forms of creativity and aesthetics.

Review of Brandon Labelle. 2010. Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life . New York and London: Continuum

Where do sounds come from, and where do they go? is the framing question of Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life, Brandon LaBelle's wide-ranging investigation into the function of sound as a binding, relational medium. This core query is answered with a series of gestures: self- touching, gesturing to the air, touching others. Over the book's course, LaBelle amply demonstrates how much about the acoustic paradigm can be read into this simple (silent) interaction: how sound-and listening-attaches us to one another and to our environments, and the ways in which these attachments are woven into the shared condition of the everyday. In a book about subtle and fleeting connections, any attempts at narra­ tive continuity seem overwrought. Often Acoustic Territories reads more as a collection of standalone essays-three of the six chapters presented here have appeared on their own and carry perceptible shifts in attention and scope-that, when placed together, seem to shatter into myriad discrete points of departure, courtesy of the great wealth of examples. Each fragment begs further interest. In some ways it follows from where LaBelle began in his 2006 historical survey of sound art practices, Background Noise, now juxtaposing case studies and theoretical writing on sound with examples of artistic intervention, intentionally blurring the already vague boundaries between "sound culture" and "sound art," traveling from site to site without historical linearity. In another sense the text is a targeted contribution to the slippery and expanding field of sound studies that examines "the exchanges between environments and the people within them as registered through aural experience" and takes into account the "careful consideration of the performative relations inherent to urban spatiality;' proposing "sound studies as a practice poised to creatively engage these relations" (LaBelle 2010, xviii). Is there any way to speak precisely about sound studies? Constructed as scaffolding onto an open-ended array of established fields (including musicology, sociology, history of art, performance studies, and the study of science and technology), it eschews strict formal boundaries, taking the shape of correlative networks. The 2010 Society for Ethnomusicology an­ nual meeting, held in Los Angeles shortly after the publication of Acoustic Territories, took the theme "Sound Ecologies," foregrounding music's link to discussions of human rights, social action, identity, and environmental

Sonozones

The 'sonozones' project investigates sound art practices in public places through personal and public acts of listening and sounding. The topic is explored using artistic processes developed on site in Mülheim in the Ruhr region of central Germany. Four sound art practitioners collaboratively explore ideas and concepts that question the significance and impact of listening and sounding in public places and suburban and urban spaces. The project collects traces and artefacts of the artistic processes as a basis for investigations into key elements of the individual and social dimensions of sound art. The exploration of forms sets the stage for experiments, interventions, and performative presences carried out on site by the artists. A continuous dialogue and the collection of verbal reflections frames these activities. In addition to texts, this exposition lays out a collection of audio recordings, photographs, and videos in order to document and convey sensory experiences as well as thoughts.

Garso meno praktikos miesto erdvėse

The paper is devoted to the analysis of sound art practices that take place in city spaces. The notion of sound - scape is presented in its historical context, which was significant as a basis for the genre of audio walks, devel- opment of auditive culture and the status of everyday sound as a potential subject for an aesthetic experience. The article describes principles of sound art practices that are related to an urban awareness by presenting particular cases. From this perspective, various genres of sound art are presented: phonography (field record - ings), sound installations, artistic interventions, performative and complex art practices.

EcoSono: Adventures in interactive ecoacoustics in the world

I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.John Muir (1913)This article describes several recent projects that together illustrate an evolving practice and a philosophy of ecoacoustic sound art called EcoSono. These projects foreground adventure – the live, in-person engagement with the world. As a technological sound art practice, EcoSono uses technology to link human and environmental expression, in an attempt to define a collaborative and symbiotic relationship between humans and the natural world. At the core of this work are computational and transduction technologies enabling deeper human–environment interaction. This paper describes three projects including the MICE (Mobile Interactive Computer Ensemble) World Tour, the EcoSono Institute music/science collaboration adventure, and the Agents Against Agency series in emergent and improvised musical forms. The article also addresses several key values of interactive ecoacoustics. First, it describes the importance of ‘impracticality’ in creating a productive environmentalist art work. The article also makes the case that the purpose of outdoor recording is not the acquisition of material samples, but to hear the world and learn from it.

Playing with Words: The Spoken Word in Artistic Practice (review)

Reviewed by: Playing with Words: The Spoken Word in Artistic Practice T. L. Cowan Playing with Words: The Spoken Word in Artistic Practice. Edited by Cathy Lane. London: Creative Research into Sound Art Practice (CRiSAP), 2008; pp. 206. £12.99 paper. In this collection of thirty-nine essays, textual installations, scripts, and scores, editor Cathy Lane has produced a book that is at once beautiful, thought-provoking, frustrating, and instructive. Playing with Words: The Spoken Word in Artistic Practice might be most accurately described as an exhibition catalog for an imaginary all-star poetry, composition, design, sound art, and performance extravaganza. Indeed, as an interdisciplinary showcase for this impressive array of artistic experimentation with, and exploration of, the spoken word, it will be of great interest to anyone invested in pushing the limits of the spoken word as sound in all aspects of creation. As a textual manifestation of sound art, sound design, linguistic experimentation and ethnography, experimental theatre, and performance poetry, this collection's greatest strength is its massive (and impressively international) scope, an eclecticism that compels the reader to imagine productive intersections among graphic design, sound design, performance, and composition. Here, the spoken word is the platform for interdisciplinary improvisations, and, as the title suggests, these essays and installations reveal that artistic practices based on playing with the spoken word are always already ludic experiments in polymorphous writing and performance. Sound artists and scholars will find here thirty-nine models for how to render what Lane calls "that most difficult and elusive medium to represent in print—sound" (8). However, while Lane and many of her contributors foreground the possibilities and impossibilities of rendering into print experiments with the spoken word that exist primarily as oral and/or digital performance, I am not convinced that this dilemma of translation has been resolved here. It is, of course, difficult to imagine what many of these scores and scripts sound like in performance, and I want to hear (and see) in performance many of these contributions. Although I have been annoyed by similar requests made by readers of my own work, I found myself repeatedly wishing for an accompanying DVD or audiovisual website, thinking that this kind of additional material would increase the usability of the text, especially its pedagogical applicability. Just as my own response to readers' requests for audiovisual accompaniment for print explorations of spoken-word performance has been to encourage my readers to seek out the artists I study, Playing with Words has certainly piqued my interest in many artists formerly unknown to me, and has increased my regard for the artists with whom I was already familiar. To satisfy my need for sound, I found a good deal of the artists' materials on their personal websites, which Lane provides, when available, at the beginning of each entry. (For example, the websites for Dirk Huelstrunk, Tomomoi Adachi, Joan La Barabara, and Pamela Z lead a reader/listener to their sounds.) Enthusiastic readers might also find themselves revisiting Kenneth Goldsmith's Ubu-web.com to explore another impressive collection of sound experiments (which include installments by several artists included in Playing with Words). In her brief introductory essay, "Acts of Translation," Lane explains that her curatorial dictum to the contributing artists asked that they "engage with two separate but intertwined issues: on the one hand, the motivating ideas and artistic concerns that inform their work along with the creative methods needed to bring them to fruition, and on the other, how best to translate something of their inspiration, concerns, methods and the work itself on the printed page" (8). This essay also provides an exploration of Lane's sense of play in her own compositions, a playfulness I find reflected in her curation. The book is not separated into sections or organized by genre: essays slide into interviews, into graphic art, into scripts into scores. Each installation/ contribution both stands on its own and participates in the larger exhibition of the book, and while a reader might sometimes feel a bit of generic whiplash from the jolts between each short piece, it strikes me that any imposition of "order" on this collection would have necessarily constrained the openness...

Language ecology and photographic sound in the McWorld

The unique sounds of the world's small-scale languages are being extinguished at an alarming rate. This article explores links between acoustic ecology and language ecology and outlines an approach to the creation of archive material as both source for and useful by-product of sound art practice and research. Through my work with endangered click-languages in the Kalahari Desert, it considers the boundaries between language and music and discusses the use of flat speaker technology to explore new relations between sound and image, portrait and soundscape in a cross-cultural context.