why ~ sound art? is a series of articles about sound art.

The main goal of the (rather) short articles is not to explain – or show – or grasp – the gargantuan meaning of sound in this specific context “of art” but rather uncover the different perceptions that sound art has been and is going through.

I want to specify that these writings come from the perspective of a practitioner, someone who works in this field rather than observing it or researching it. More specifically, they are written from the position of someone who cannot easily delineate, within their own practice, the boundaries of this form of art.

When is something sound art? When is composition? Or multimedia art? When is something else entirely?

 

I. N. T. R. O. –

 

Sound art is a broad definition of an art where sound is not the only medium (furthermore, sound is not always the main artistic medium in sound art)¹ but becomes a means of exploring a concept, an idea, a manifestation, a speculation.

What unites such vast land is less the material of sound itself but rather the way to reflect upon the perception of sound, its meanings and its strong connection with imagination.

The term, its history, the traditions, and the many “misinterpretations” of its meaning have given rise to a multiplicity of contexts, none of which can be fully contained by a single definition.

I focus on the term itself because, at times, the discourses that revolve around it reveal more than the works they seek to describe. The category of a work becomes self-explanatory of a way of understanding the relation with the work itself and its surroundings. 

Unlike Neue Musik and other genres historically defined within the authority of the “old white male” canon, sound art emerged as an extra-institutional umbrella in the motto of the 70s American ontology “what is this?”². 

Thus the term now circulates in a variety of contexts and cultures. These roots are forgotten or ignored for a variety of reasons that we can’t discuss here.

Should those roots matter? Perhaps sound art is like moss: as terms it spreads, it attaches to different surfaces, it persists less by origin than by its capacity to adapt and proliferate.


When we talk about art, more specifically a certain “pigments” of art (visual art, multimedia art, land art, sonic arts, sound art etc.), we inevitably enter the terrain of institutional taxonomies: scholarship, grant and other institutionalised environments like museums that seek to create an order of things that often are not meant to be categorised.

Yet, from within the act of making, as practitioner I guess, the question of definition becomes almost redundant. To ask whether one is engaging in sound art, experimental music, sound design or composition is to misplace the point of origin. Practice begins not from a category but from the work one does. Nevertheless is a question that keeps coming and probably needs to be found in something that we are going to discuss later on. 

It is a nonsense jump into an indeterminate sea, where orientation no longer follows the logic of nomenclature but that of sensation  guided by the memory of the body suspended in fluid, by the starry sky as the only possible map.

It is difficult, though, to not see sound art as the most fragile and, at the same time, most exposed practice because it’s caught in a paradox of definition: too broad to be contained and too narrow to be everything.

As a genre, it presents itself double sided: on one hand as “art of sound” (a formulation that has difficulties), and on the other, as a genre among genres, subjected to the same classificatory walls we create between things.

When the term is used as a curatorial lingo it creates a problem: when is sound art and when is music that explores a different face of itself? Or is there even any difference now? 

The latter years show something clear: installations with sound have been defined as sound art (when it’s not the primary focus), beautiful concerts commercialised as sound art. One can even find albums on Bandcamp having the sound art tag that, while genuinely beautiful, consist simply of voice and guitar, framed within an indie-folk idiom.

This reveals the fragility and heterogeneity of today’s musical landscape, one that is still struggling to grasp its own place and significance in relation to a word: a concept, a feeling, a lingo.

If the reader is mostly interested about the root of sound art, I should advise two books: Sound art: Concept and practices by Thom Holmes and Sound art revisited by Alan Licht.

 

1. See Budhaditya Chattopadhyay, “Beyond Matter: Object-disoriented Sound Art”, 2017. Through a particular exhibition he argues that sound resists the codification of visual art objects: it is neither a complete medium or simply sculpture. Instead, sound art enacts “auditory situations”. ↩︎
2. See Something Else Press 1963-1974 and ‘‘call what is essentially new music something else – ‘Sound Art’’’ (Neuhaus, 2000). ↩︎