An InternationalJournal ofMusic Technology

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ISSN 1355-7718

O R G A N I S E D S O U N D

E D I TO R

Leigh LandyDe Montfort University, Leicester

A S S O C I AT E E D I TO R S

Ross Kirk Richard OrtonUniversity of York University of York

S U B S C R I P T I O N S

Organised Sound (ISSN 1355-7718, Electronic ISSN 1469-8153) is published three times a year in April, August and December. Three parts form a volume. An annual CD accompanies each volume in the last issue, and is free of charge to subscribers. The subscription price (excluding VAT and sales tax) of volume 14 (2009) (which includes postage) is £146 net (US$262) for institutions print and electronic, institutions electronic only is £131/$235; and £39 net (US$59) for individuals and £27 net (US$40) for students ordering direct from the publisher and certifying that the journal is for their personal use. Single parts are £53 (US$92) plus postage. US$ rates are payable by subscribers in the USA, Canada and Mexico.

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E D I TO R I A L B OA R D

Marc BattierUniversité de Paris IV-Sorbonne, Paris

Hannah BosmaNEAR, Amsterdam

Alessandro CiprianiScuola di Musica Elettronica Conservatorio di Musica Frosinone

Simon EmmersonDe Montfort University, Leicester

Rajmil FischmanUniversity of Keele

David HowardUniversity of York

Rosemary MountainConcordia University, Montreal, Canada

Tony MyattUniversity of York

Jean-Claude RissetCNRS, Marseille

Francis RumseyUniversity of Surrey

Margaret SchedelCalifornia

Mary SimoniUniversity of Michigan

R E G I O NA L E D I TO R S

Joel Chadabe (North America)Electronic Music Foundation, New York, USAKenneth Fields (East Asia)Peking University, ChinaEduardo Miranda (South America)University of PlymouthJøran Rudi (Europe)NOTAM, University of Oslo

Barry Truax (North America)Simon Fraser UniversityIan Whalley (Australasia)University of WaikatoDave Worrall (Australasia)School of Creative Communication, University of Canberra

EDITORIAL

Sound art is a slippery term, not well defined andabsorbing new artistic practices so rapidly that itis in danger of collapsing as a meaningful category.Perhaps a lack of definition and clear delimitations isalso what makes sound art so attractive, allowing forits large diversity and offering few of the taxonomyrestraints that generally characterise music and arthistorical academic discourse. Yet this sensed free-dom does not mean that the genre is free frominstitutionalisation. Thus, the increasing number ofartistic productions broadly labelled sound art thatare penetrating both white cubes and public spaces isa phenomenon that warrants closer investigation.A practice dating back to the 1970s, sound art has

developed as a hybrid art form that encompassesworks easily categorised in terms of other genresand media, including installation art, performance,soundscape works, drama, poetry, sound/text art,film, radio, the Internet, and more. The genre soundart has thus emerged through a multitude of startingpoints. Considering changes in artistic practicesthat transgress traditional lines of demarcation, thisdevelopment points to the need for a cross-dis-ciplinary approach to analysing and understandingsound art, drawing on frameworks of interpretationfrom other art forms as well. As Douglas Kahn(2006) describes, the very term ‘sound art’ seems tonarrow down the sphere of understanding insteadof expanding it.The early focus on architecture and acoustics so

prevalent in the German Klangkunst tradition, forexample, or the more Anglo-American focus onexperimental music paradigms, has now been sup-plemented by what may be called a neo-modernistperspective, where interpretation and meaning departfrom a wider set of competences than what is foundin the singular arts. In discussions of sound art, whichoften has a visual component, there are a number ofrepeating concepts. It is frequently argued that soundart is mainly about space, while music is about time.A line of reasoning in this discussion is the distinctionbetween space as a general acoustic precondition,and place as a specific acoustic and social site. Otherdistinctions are made between sound art and musicby arguing that meaning-making processes in visualart and music have significantly different points ofdeparture.

The composer’s surface is an illusion into which he putssomething real – sound.The painter’s surface is something real from which hethen creates an illusion.1

Despite this pointed statement, music and visual art areboth time-dependent constructs in the viewer/listener,containing narratives that are both material and imma-terial. The closeness between music and sound art isobvious, and for example Landy (2007) has argued thatsound art can be considered as a subset of music, andthat a more important difference in the sound domainlies in whether the artists focus on work with concretematerial, or with pitch-based and notated structures.

Sound and its references allow artistic treatment ofsubjects and associations in much the same way as otherart forms, through listening for both abstract forms andreferential traces and connections. At the same time,sound art unveils elements and aspects that other artforms cannot reach. Thus I propose that sound art beunderstood as a sonification of artistic ideas, or sonicrepresentations of the same. This perspective reachesbeyond traditional boundaries of art genres, whether thetimbral focus of music or the acoustic particularities ofinstallation art. In this sense, music becomes a subset ofsound art, in the same way as it may be said – somewhatjokingly – to be a specific instance of applied physics.

To illustrate this notion of sonification, I provide twoexamples from a recent sound art exhibition, Absorptionand Resonance – Sound and Meaning, at the HenieOnstad Art Centre in Oslo.2 These works use writtentext as material, with the use of sound providing a richsubtext. The first example, Transfer (Finborud 2008),consists of the sound recorded from writing a specifictext, which is also displayed on paper. The manner inwhich the text was written, and the diffusion of thesound around the listener, allows the public to hear andfollow the temperament, speed and intention of thewriting in a way that could never be read. In this way,the audience concretely experiences issues of cross-representation. The other example, Wittgenstein Chairs(Hagen 2008), consists of a recording of the reading of aWittgenstein text combined with a montage of soundsthat Wittgenstein has stated have importance for him.

1Brian O’Doherty in an interview with Morton Feldman (Feldman1998: 2).2See Rudi 2008.

Organised Sound 14(1): 1–2 & 2009 Cambridge University Press. Printed in the United Kingdom. doi:10.1017/S1355771809000016

Through this combination, the artist reveals some of thesubtext for Wittgenstein’s oeuvre; the sounding contextwithin which the philosopher worked – another per-spective that cannot be reached by written word alone.

These works reflect a new trend in sound art, then,with a referential aspect – sonification – that hasmoved away from a modernist focus on material,inner coherence, and the autonomous work. This newtrend aligns with process-oriented and participatorytrends in contemporary art. As such, ‘listening stra-tegies’ and ‘ontology’ become key concepts for pub-lics and artists in their approaches to recognizing andmaking sense of constructed or natural sound objectsand environments, and relevant themes for a specialissue of Organised Sound.

This issue contains articles that approach theoryand a number of concrete works from different per-spectives. Alan Licht, author of Sound Art (2007),gives a thorough and detailed introduction and his-torical overview of the genre and its aesthetic roots,and is rich in examples. Andreas Engstrom and AsaStjerna approach the understanding of sound artthrough an analysis of the literature on the subject,describing how the written discourse has contributedto defining the field differently in the German andAnglo-American traditions.

In his article, Christoph Cox develops an onthol-ogy of sound, an onthology that is revealed throughthe meaning-making-processes involved in sound artand its call upon the auditory unconscious, which hecalls ‘noise’. In assigning meaning to sounds, they aretransformed from noise to signal.

Lilian Campesato brings out core elements in thefelt differences between music and sound art in herdescriptions of sound art’s referential and repre-sentational discourses. Her point of departure is thedifferent conceptualisations of time and spaceemployed in sound art and music.

Joanna Demers discusses field recordings, and inparticular those of Francisco Lopez and ToshiyaTsunoda. She finds that these are best understood inrelation to the visual arts concept of ‘objecthood’,disengaged from their context and referential meaning.Dani Iosafat discusses oppositions in perspectives onsonification, and considers sonic representation of siteas ‘psychosonification’ (developed from the Situa-tionist concept of psychogeography), grounded in theconcrete actions, aspects and relationships in anexperienced locality.

In her text, Claudia Tittel discusses differentapproaches to changing situations and contexts withsound, with a particular concern for socioculturalaspects of site-specific works. Several works of Chris-tina Kubisch are discussed in depth, as examples onhow otherwise unnoticeable aspects our environmentcan be made perceptible through sonification.

The use of sound for creating narratives in movies isthe main theme in Julio d’Escrivan’s text, and hefocuses on sound’s implied signfication rather than onits physical qualities. He also provides a short history ofsound in film, outlining the early beginnings of elec-tronic sound generation and manipulation.

The work of Finnish performance artist Heidi Fastis the topic for Gascia Ouzonian’s article. Fast usesher voice to ‘actualise’ social situations through thetransformation of her actions. Owen Chapman dis-cusses his work The Icebreaker as a combination ofperformance, soundscape composition and soundinstallation, bringing unnoticed sounds and contextsto our attention.

Virginia Madsen reconsiders the power of sound inher discussion of her performance piece Cantata ofFire, a work based on the Waco incident of 1993.Sound was used actively as a weapon in this incidentas a means of subduing a religious sect that hadbarricaded itself in its compound.

Georg Klein’s article contains a personal discussionof sound installations in public space, with a particularfocus on transitory spaces. The author considers thetransformation of public space into ‘place’ through theuse of site-specific sound (Ortsklang).

The collection of articles thus forms a wide set ofapproaches to the term and practice of sound art,grounding them within the discourse of music repre-sented in this journal. We have aimed to strategicallyuse the strain that sound art places on traditionaldiscourses of what constitutes music in order toenrich debate, and to contribute perspectives to thecontinually changing self-understanding any artisticorganisation of sound makes possible.

Jøran RudiGuest Editor

REFERENCES

Feldman, Morton. 1998. Between Categories. ContemporaryMusic Review 2(2).

Finborud, Lars Mørch. 2008. Transfer – A Discussion of Bjørn

Erik Haugen’s Work. In Jøran Rudi (ed.), Absorption andResonance – Sound and Meaning. Oslo: NOTAM, 65–6.

Hagen, Lars Petter. 2008. An Exacting, InvestigativeManner of Working – A discussion of Emil Bernhardt’s

work Wittgenstein Chairs. In Jøran Rudi (ed.), Absorp-tion and Resonance – Sound and Meaning. Oslo:NOTAM, 60–1.

Kahn, Douglas. 2006. The Arts of Sound Art and Music.http://www.douglaskahn.com/writings/douglas_kahn-sound_art.pdf (accessed 30 October 2008).

Landy, Leigh. 2007. Understanding the Art of SoundOrganisation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Licht, Alan. 2007. Sound Art: Beyond Music, Beyond

Categories. New York: Rizzoli.Rudi, Jøran (ed.) 2008. Absorption and Resonance – Sound

and Meaning. Oslo: NOTAM.

2 Editorial

Site-Sounds: On strategies of sound art inpublic space

GEORG KLEIN

KlangQuadrat – Office for Sound and Media Art, Manteuffelstr. 77, D–10999 Berlin, GermanyE-mail: mail@georgklein.de

During the mid twentieth century, space was developed as a

composable dimension. Composers used the three spatial

dimensions in their own fashion, but space was understood

primarily as an abstract concept. It was not until the

development of sound installation art that space was discovered

in a concrete manner, explored, performed in and could even

acquire its own specificity, called site-sound (Ortsklang).The article shows consequences and strategies of site-

sound installations in three sections – from spatial sound to

site-sound, public space as performance venue, and public

strategies (acoustic interventions, interactive installations and

participatory projects) – with three examples of site-sound

installations (Site-Sound Marl Mitte, meta.stases andtowersounds.2: watch tower).

Acoustic art in public spaces basically involves installing a

space in another existing space, both physically and sensorially,

and metaphysically and mentally – an interior space in an

exterior space, so to speak. The original quality of sound art

lies in the oscillation of interior and exterior space. Thus publicspaces intensified by sound art cause transitional spaces to

come into being, in a political and a psychoanalytic sense.

1. REVIEW: FROM SPATIAL SOUND TO

SITE-SOUND (RAUMKLANG – ORTSKLANG)

With the rise of serial music during the mid twentiethcentury, space was developed as a composable dimen-sion. Starting from concert situations that eliminatedfrontal orchestral performances, it was above all thedevelopment of multichannel loudspeaker systems –culminating in modern wave-field synthesis – whichmade it possible to exploit space as a parameter forcomposition. Varese and Stockhausen used the threespatial dimensions in their own fashion, as did Boulez,Cage and Schnebel. Space was understood primarily asan abstract concept, however.It was not until the development of sound installation

art that space was discovered in a concretemanner. Thespecificity of a certain space could be brought out:sound artists work with the atmosphere of a particularspace, its acoustic conditions and its visual and archi-tectonic characteristics, to which they carefully give anew timbre or which they present dramatically throughthe medium of sound. The sound of a space is nolonger one of several compositional dimensions, butmoves to the centre of perception as sound space,

as space that is made to resound, which is reflected inthe behaviour of the recipient. If the visual focus ofa performing musician or ensemble is removed andlisteners are no longer compelled to sit in fixed seatsbut can move around freely within the space, a muchstronger spatial perception is possible. ‘Seeing andhearing complement each other to become a holisticspatial experience that is intensified, supplemented andcompleted by the other senses and realised through themovement of the body in the space’ (Ruth 2006: 237).

This specific work with space involves a con-textualisation that is more likely to be found in thevisual arts. The performance or installation site itselfbecomes part of the artistic statement and can evenbecome the point of departure for the artistic con-cept. When the spatial orientation of the music goesbeyond the spatial characteristics in the narrowersense (acoustic, architectonic, sculptural, perspecti-val; so-called Raumklang) and defines the site speci-ficity of the space, I refer to a site-sound, so-calledOrtsklang. I am not concerned with (more or lessfinished) works that are installed at a particular sitebut works that grow out of the site, both conceptuallyand in their execution.

A site-sound develops from an analysis and investi-gation of the situation on site. How does the site pre-sent itself acoustically, visually and architectonically?What materials and objects dominate the site? Whatrole does the site play in social life; how do peoplemove on the site; what meanings are attached to it?What is the perception situation; what encounters takeplace there? What memory does the site have; whatstories are associated with it? What socio-politicalreferences does the site have; what social relationshipto nature defines the site? What conflicts are there inthe site, concealed or conspicuous?

Through this site research – not unlike the psy-chogeography of the situationists in the 1960s – athematic focus, a concept, is developed with whichthe site is altered through sound art – in other words,the situation on the site is influenced and aestheticallyintensified.

My first example (Sound example 1) is the sound/light-installation Site-Sound Marl Midtown. BlueBrat. Much Art. Little Work from 2002 at a little train

Organised Sound 14(1): 101–108 & 2009 Cambridge University Press. Printed in the United Kingdom. doi:10.1017/S1355771809000132

station in Germany’s biggest industrial area, theRuhrgebiet. The train station ‘Marl Centre’ is cov-ered by a concrete hall that has no function: it doesnot serve as a waiting room since the people waitingare all standing on the station platform below. Notrain tickets are sold here and there is no informationservice; the hall opens in a gaping void to the south-west and consequently provides no shelter from rain,sun, wind or snow (figure 1).

The Marl Centre train station and its surroundingsare marked by an urban desolation characteristic ofmodern city suburbs and satellites. The decline is all themore painfully apparent when contrasted with its pre-vious wealth (from mining and chemistry), attested toby the art treasures in the nearby sculpture gardens.

The sound material was gathered entirely from thislocation, the train station itself. Firstly, sound wastaken from the bars in the side walls (of two lengths,hence two pitches), which formed the sound back-ground in the concrete hall by means of four loud-speakers and two subwoofers distributed throughoutthe space. The other sound material consisted of graffitiinscriptions from the waiting room on the train plat-form where the conflicts of the locale are laconicallyand bluntly expressed: conflicts between the right andleft, foreigners and Germans, adults and youth;between declarations of love and of despair, ‘no future’and sunny optimism. ‘Suakraz, you’re the best.’ ‘Sickkids. Live in their own filth. Pigs.’ ‘Dear Geli, dearVanni, I hope you forgive me! I’m really crazy aboutyou!’ ‘Life is hard1unjust.’ ‘Turks! White Power is thebest thing in Marl!’ ‘Love is a name. Sex is a game.Forget the name and play the game.’ ‘Embellish the citygates with Nazi heads.’ ‘I hate you right-wing pigs!!! –and I hate you, you left-wing wimp!’

These sayings were collected and then spoken to tape byyoung people from Marl. The recordings were arrangedinto a voice choir which sounded out of twelve further

loudspeakers, hanging from the ceiling of the hall(figure 2). What previously adorned the walls unnoticednow became an unmediated acoustic presence for the

passers-by. Therewith, by means of three CD playersplaying at different time intervals, a constantly changingvoice-bar arrangement was created. At night, the inner

space of the hall was lit by a utopian blue such that thetransformation of the hall could be recognised from faraway. A billboard on the side of the train station was

rented and, apart from the title, offered a free, whitespace such that for the duration of the installation aprocess of public comment came into being.

The installation provoked strong reactions amongthe public: some speakers were damaged; some teenschoose the hall as a meeting point at night, writingsome comments on the billboard; and a long discus-sion on this kind of ‘sculptural blemish’ and the socialproblems around the city station was going on in thelocal press during the three-month run (see discussionin Ruth 2006: 241).

The German term Ortsklang, used in the title,expresses a stronger concept of site specifity. In termsof its approach, this general development of space toplace is analogous to methods that are more familiarin the visual arts – from objet trouve to opposite polessuch as land art and social sculpture, to current stra-tegies like artistic field research and intervention. It isa material confrontation with reality, which in themusical tradition has thus far only taken place inmusique concrete and with several Fluxus artistsduring the 1960s. The dual material orientation to theworld – through the site as a performance venue andthe aesthetic and thematic conversion of the site –achieves and demands a much deeper penetration andintegration with reality, thus enabling another formof political confrontation.

Figure 1. Site-Sound Marl Midtown. (Ortsklang MarlMitte), sound/light installation in which visual graffiti textsat the railway station in Marl were recited as an acousticspeech choir, in combination with two electronically

modified grid sounds and blue light. Georg Klein, GermanSound Art Award 2002.

Figure 2. Site-Sound Marl Midtown. (Ortsklang MarlMitte), visitor under the twelve horn speakers. The iron

bars can be seen in the background.

102 Georg Klein

2. PUBLIC SPACE AS PERFORMANCE VENUE

Although the development of a site-sound (Ortsk-lang) can be used in concert and gallery spaces, it hasa far broader area of application and greater poten-tial if it is related to public and semi-public spaces,especially so-called transitory spaces as shown in thefirst example. These sites and non-sites – arcades,shopping malls, railway stations, squares, pedestrianunderpasses, urban brown fields, kiosks – are notneutral but are influenced by everyday life, by usesand functions, stories and encounters far removedfrom art.Public space defines itself not simply by its

demarcation from private space but as a politicalspace through its degrees of freedom (explained inmore detail in Klein 2003a), which can be brieflycharacterised as follows:

> Freedom of access: there is no entrance fee, nospecial dress regulation, no special security andpolice personnel, no surveillance.

> Freedom of movement: there are no spatialrestrictions (fixed seating) and no time limits(length of stay).

> Freedom of possession: the public space is notindividual, company or state property in the sensethat institutions are in possession of the space, asin the case of town halls or concert halls.

> Freedom of use: apart from its function as urbanspace, it has no specific purpose, in contrast tostate or institutional spaces and pseudo-publicspaces such as shopping arcades or entire shop-ping centres, which simulate public spaces butserve primarily to stimulate shopping.

These degrees of freedom have not come about bychance but have been gained over centuries. Publicspace is currently losing this freedom, whetherthrough surveillance cameras or huge advertisements,but also due to a loss of importance in view of theincreasingly powerful public media. The politicalimportance of public space becomes especiallyobvious in this context, however. For those who haveno access to state or privately controlled media,there is only the street, public space, which then canin turn become a link in the media public again by theattention of the press or TV broadcasting companies.In particular, appropriation by the capitalist

economy aims at doing away with open, publicspaces, which are transformed into ‘mere passage-ways, mere access to places for consumption andleisure activities’ (Sanio 2006: 9). ‘Art in publicspaces’ has long been part of this appropriation whenit refers to urban sculptural furnishings or acousticornamental art. Emphasising the freedom of thisspace and making people aware that it is decreasingand being violated is the challenge of artistic work,

both in public spaces and semi-public spaces forconsumption and shopping.

Critical works quickly come up against boundaries,as one must observe even in a cosmopolitan, tradi-tionally art-friendly city such as Berlin.1 These bound-aries are not merely restrictions but a source of frictionas well. In contrast to art, theatre and concert spaces –in which virtually everything is allowed but which noone exploits any more, since the artistic environmentguarantees benevolent understanding or art makes noimpression on indifferent tolerance – in public space,including media space, social confrontation is a given.An artist is at the mercy of societal dynamics, betweeneconomic, social and political interests, and soonencounters opposition if his art does not devote itselfto mere urban ornamentation. Whereas only peopleinterested in art go to art spaces, public space hasthe most varied, diverse audience imaginable, fromthe unemployed to stockbrokers. The reactions ofan audience whose everyday routine is confused,disturbed or stimulated are thus equally varied.

Disturbing everyday routine is a main point in mynext example (Sound example 2). In the installationmeta.stases (meta.stasen) an interactive sound instal-lation was built in a tram car that ran on Line 8through Dresden for ten days (figure 3). The tramoperated without a fixed schedule, amongst regulartraffic, and appeared unexpectedly. People goingfrom home to work, from work to shopping, fromshopping to home entered this tram by accident.

Figure 3. meta.stases (meta.stasen): sound/light-installationin a tram car. Vehicle noises are recorded in the engine roomof an old Tatra tram and played back live and transformed

in the passenger compartment along with loudspeakerannouncements. Please imagine intense purple light inside.

European Centre of Arts Hellerau, Dresden, 2007.

1As in, for example, my project ‘too big to fail’, in an architecto-nically very attractive public toilet in front of the headquarters ofthe Landesbank Berlin on Alexanderplatz. It was to examine theBerlin banking scandal, but its execution was prevented. See Klein2005.

Site-Sounds 103

Cables, streets and railways are the arteries of ourcivilisation. Goods, information and people areshuttled from one place to another – uninterruptedly,busily, tirelessly – pushed by the main economic aim:growth. Like a magic word it is supposed to solve allthe social and economic problems of our globalisedsociety. Growth has to be relentlessly stimulated –worldwide, permanently, without limits. The instal-lation confronted listeners, workers and consumers,with the prevailing ideology of growth in all spheresof life – health, business or politics – including allits excrescences and deformities. On their way thepassengers got the latest ‘news’, original quotes onthe topic of growth spoken by well-known newsannouncers from Dresden’s MDR radio station andthe US-American NPR news radio.

These ‘news’ items contrasted natural growth,which – unless pathological – always proceeds gra-dually, with globally propagated economic growth,which should be as unchecked as possible. The lan-guage of business ‘growth makers and pushers’ wasconfronted with the language of cancer researchers,who regard this excessive enlargement as a commu-nication failure between cells which ‘issue orders togrow to themselves’.

These texts were permeated by musical processes: acontrasting medium that sharpens perception. Theyrendered the theme aurally and visually perceptible, inthe form of a spatial–acoustic metastasis with 111 tinyloudspeakers (figure 4). The loudspeakers were stuckto purple-tinted windows in small groups; from eachone a black wire led along the tram’s ceiling to thefront, producing a seemingly floral excrescence. Anacoustic metastasis could suddenly occur, produced byring modulation processes mutating the spoken textsinto a chirping flying quickly through the space of thetram. The sequence of texts was controlled by the tramitself as it appropriated the announcement of stopswith their characteristic ding-dong and used it as achance impulse for playing a certain text. This resultedin a continually changing rendition corresponding tothe 26 tram stops in Dresden.

Two additional floor-level speakers also transmittedthe moving vehicle sounds of the tram, recorded liveand musically transformed by means of resonance fil-ters and delays. The result was the fundamental soundambience for the tram. Together with the purple-tintedwindows the installation transformed the tram car intoan audiovisual space of alteration. The city appearedin a tinted light, while tram noises, signals andannouncements were musically processed live, creatingan acoustic and visual alteration of our accustomedperspective of the world outside. Some people werefascinated, some people were shocked by the ‘sick’atmosphere inside – the light, the sounds, the excres-cence of cables and the permanent reading of news,telling the opposite: ‘This is no disease. This is growth.’

3. PUBLIC STRATEGIES

The performer’s relationship with the audience hadalready been approached and examined radicallyduring the 1960s. Experimental concert forms, thea-trical abuse of audiences and actionist performancesbroke down conventional audience attitudes, buttheir shock effect was also exhausted. Whereas ser-ious music soon returned to its conventional prac-tices, visual art gradually developed new forms ofaudience orientation with interaction, interventionand participation. These forms also occur in soundart, although this is less likely to have a politicaldimension. All three forms – intervention, interactionand participation – are process-based, which is to saythey do not start with a finished work but a situation.

Acoustic interventions in urban space are extremelydependent on the perception situation on site. People’svisual orientation in everyday life and acousticallyeffected stress of traffic noise make sound art inter-ventions considerably more difficult than performativeor visual interventions. Purely acoustic art is rare2, andsound art is generally accompanied by visual elements,be it visible sound objects, light or video. The factor of

Figure 4. Sound/light-installation meta.stases (meta.stasen).Listener with group of loudspeakers. At each of the 13

windows a group of speakers is playing news, sometimesring modulated (all together 111 little speakers, 13channels). All the cables are installed so that they are

visible through the entire tram car.

2For example, the works of Sam Auinger, which are often posi-tioned at acoustic borders in urban spaces.

104 Georg Klein

confusion is the most important element – to interruptthe everyday routine for a moment, to make peoplepause and assume a different perceptual attitude is thebasis of every acoustic intervention.3 Depending onwhere these subtle situational changes are installed –whether in trees in a park or in parking garages, onchurch facades or in the midst of crowds of shoppers –the intervention also acquires a political dimension. Thechoice of site is crucial to the statement.Interactive installations incorporate the physical

movements of the recipient into the sound generationso that the audience orientation is intensified. Usingcomputer-controlled systems, interactive soundevents can be produced which generate musical pro-cesses that are far from simple stimulus–reactionschemata and which bring the body into play again inthe otherwise incorporeal installation world.4 Theyprovide a framework in which the work is not executeduntil the moment the recipient appears, which conse-quently involves a certain incalculability calling forgreat openness on the part of both the producing artistand the receiving listener. The category of chanceintroduced by John Cage is continued here in a per-petual process of musical transformation oriented tothe audience. Although they are not easy to execute inpublic spaces because they represent a substantialinstallation expenditure, interactive installations hold aspecial fascination, since the possibility for discovery –and thus the element of surprise and pleasure in thediscovery – is considerably greater than in art spaces,where the visitor is already pre-attuned, forewarnedand prepared by the artistic setting. Inviting an artpublic to an installation of this kind in a public space isthus almost counterproductive, since the possibility ofhappening upon it by chance no longer exists. Profes-sional art viewers are also compelled to observe notonly the work but the audience’s actions and theirreactions to it as well.Up to now, participatory projects have rarely been

found in sound installation art, but more in Internetmedia space or in other communications media. Withthe network structure of an open broadcast system,anyone can become a potential broadcaster, and sincethe technological basis (computer with sound gen-eration and processing software) became affordablefor the general public in the 1990s, anyone can alsobecome a music and sound producer. Participatorypotentials thus emerge which go beyond a simpleparticipatory phase. Although the available audienceon the Internet is limited, particularly as far as theheterogeneity of the public or the participating actors

is concerned, what initially was still restricted toknowledgeable, technically skilled users will expandin the future (see YouTube). The artistic potential isstill open-ended. This development will also have aretroactive effect on physical public spaces in whichparticipatory installations can be created, as hasalready been established by visual media facades.

The forms of audience orientation presented herecan be combined and are obviously not only encoun-tered in public spaces. But working in public spacesparticularly necessitates thinking about how I reachmy public, attract it to the work, hold it and let it goagain. These are questions that also arise in the concerthall, and within the music are sparked by the conceptof tension, which is oriented to time. With installa-tions, however, I am referring to an area of tensionthat is created by sound art interventions and in whicha concept of time exists that is fundamentally differentfrom that of concert music (see also Klein 2003b).

The audience orientation can also be developed into aregular public relations strategy that makes the externalappearance of the artwork in public (announcements,press releases, website) part of the work. One form ofthis is the fake which, at first glance, pretends not tobe art at all but poses as something else. The elementof confusion can thus be enormously intensified anddeveloped beyond the initial moment. The provoca-tive potential can be very great, as I was able toestablish in my project towersounds.2: Watch Tower(turmlaute.2: Wachturm) (Sound example 3) at theMaerzMusik Festival in 2007, with the appearance inpublic of a newly founded organisation – the EuropeanBorder Watch (EUBW).

EU citizens were invited to monitor the EUexternal borders from their homes as web patrolsagainst illegal immigrants. The audiovisual andinteractive installation in a former GDR borderwatchtower was passed off as the registration centreof the EUBW (figures 5 and 6), which demonstratedthe new surveillance technology modelled on GoogleEarth and at the same time was integrated into thegruesome surveillance history of this site.5

The background was a test run in November 2006in Texas, where, at the instigation of Governor RickPerry, webcams were installed along a short sectionof the fence on the US–Mexican border, the imagesfrom which could be accessed by anyone worldwide.

The European Border Watch Organisation(EUBW) was founded on the basis of the Texanmodel and has established its recruitment centre in theBerlin border watchtower. Registration takes place

3Found in a conceptually pure form in the visually marked listeningpoints of Akio Suzuki, which sharpen hearing in everyday situa-tions.4Interactive musical processes such as interactive variation andacoustical text topography are described in detail in Klein 2006.

5turmlaute.2: Wachturm – Klang | Video | Installation | Organisation |Interaktion (towersounds.2: Watch Tower – Sound | Video | Installation |Organisation | Interaction), MaerzMusik Festival 2007, with the ‘offi-cial’ website www.europeanborderwatch.org, on which there are stillreactions and ‘registrations’. For the full project description, see http://www.georgklein.de

Site-Sounds 105

on the ground floor; blue EU flags at the entrancecreate an ‘official’ atmosphere. The EUBW’s visualshowroom, with a camp bed and an old telephone, issituated on the first floor, and the second floor housesthe acoustic control room, in which the interactivesurveillance equipment is mounted.

The dark visual showroom on the first floor onlyhas narrow embrasures as window openings, six ofwhich are converted to viewing screens for theinstallation (figure 7). Webcam images of ostensibleborder events are seen on them which only showdesert, ocean or forest. Various border images aresimulated in a preliminary trailer: the Bug river onthe border between Poland and Ukraine, a view ofthe Carpathian Mountains, an image on the Molda-vian border at night, an ocean beach between theCanary Islands and northwest Africa, and a webcamimage of the US–Mexican border – the only genuineborder photo – allegedly from the partner organisa-tion, Texas Border Watch. In the same room, behindthe six embrasure covers, small loudspeakers are alsoconcealed under the video screens, from which elec-tronically altered clicking, crackling and rustlingsounds and voices can be heard now and then.

In the acoustic control room on the second floor astanding acoustic field is generated. The basis of thesound is a recording of the natural vibration of theconcrete tower (a low F-sharp, stimulated by slam-ming the heavy embrasure covers). The continuoussound represents the continuousness of the surveil-lance and changes only gradually over the duration ofthe installation in the spirit of an ‘interactive varia-tion’. The field can be modified from the outside bymeans of a laser sensor and a surveillance camerawhich react to ‘incidents’ – movements of uninvolvedpassers-by or traffic in the vicinity of the tower. Thebasic sound is composed of odd-numbered harmonicsof the low F-sharp so that approximately a squarewave is generated, which visually depicts a ‘towerwave’. As a result, the sound resembles an electricgenerator and, because of the low-frequency tonesemitted by a subwoofer, is extremely large at times.

Figure 5. East German watch tower at the Berlin Wall.

Figure 6. Entrance situation with EU flags and EUBWguiding staff.

Figure 7. towersounds.2: Watch Tower (turmlaute.2: Wach-turm), first floor with video screens installed in embrasures

and hidden speakers.

106 Georg Klein

Due to continuous variation in the partials, however,it never remains static, at least until the video cameradetects a passer-by (figures 8–10).If a passer-by crosses the middle surveillance zone,

a voice also emerges from the horn loudspeakerhanging at head level in the centre. The varioussnippets of sentences come from an interview with aborder guard who did his military service in thistower in GDR times and, over 18 years later,recounts how they worked and what unusual eventsoccurred (‘y yes, definitely’, ‘y so what we made,they were such wires, they were self-firing devices, but

they weren’t lethal y’, ‘but somehow the womanprobably – she didn’t make it’.

The second floor has continuous windows that arecovered with green transparent sheeting. As a result,on the inside all colours are altered: the viewer’s ownface is pale green and all contrasts are strangelyweakened. At the same time, the view towards theoutside is coloured green, as with military nightvision equipment.

The publicity for the installation became part ofthe artistic work and was fully integrated into theproject. Through a website created for the installa-tion, which appeared to be very serious, as well aselectronic and written invitations, EU citizens wereinvited to actively monitor the European externalborders. In addition, an invitation to the opening ofthe Berlin registration centre of the EUBW was sentto the press and everyone accessible to us via theInternet. Responses were collected by reply mail andthe feedback form on the website, and were pastedinto the comment book that was made available inthe tower. For on-site visitors there was a specialguided tour, with a welcome at the entrance on behalfof the European Border Watch (figure 11) and agreen informational handout with a web patrolregistration form on the back. In the video showroom‘George Klein’ appeared as a guide to the EUBW andexplained the satellite webcam system and the goalsof the organisation to the visitors, inviting them to liedown on the camp bed and, with this overview of allEU external borders, to choose a surveillance area. Afew people were taken with the idea, however, andwere in favour of more restrictive measures at theborder. But most of the visitors got upset, which ledto many in-depth discussions about the background,the subject matter and the objectives of the installa-tion during its four-week run.

Figure 8. towersounds.2: Watch Tower (turmlaute.2: Wach-

turm), second floor with horn loudspeaker, green shininglamps and windows, subwoofer at the back.

Figure 9. Laser sensor for traffic control used for soundtransformations.

Figure 10. Video camera for observing the park paths andinteractive play of the surveillant voice. Please imagine

intense green light.

Site-Sounds 107

4. CONCLUSION: TRANSITIONAL SPACES

The European Border Watch project dealt with theoverlapping of media space and physical space, eventhough it concerned a fake. Acoustic art in publicspaces basically involves installing a space in anotherexisting space, both physically and sensorially, andmetaphysically and mentally (as a space for reflectionand emotion) – an interior space in an exterior space,so to speak. The original quality of sound art, whichcannot be achieved by either music or the visual arts,lies in the oscillation of interior and exterior space.

Thus, public spaces intensified by sound art are notonly accommodated in so-called transitional spaces(arcades, underpasses, and so on), they cause transi-tional spaces to come into being, in a political and apsychoanalytic sense.6 They intervene between inter-ior and exterior as well as between the public and theprivate. ‘This transition represents one of the greatproblems of the continuation of the EuropeanEnlightenment’ (Neubar 2002: 29) and has a socialdimension that becomes apparent in sound art works

in public space. The previously mentioned dual mate-rial orientation to the world beyond the site and theopen form as a situational process (in the threedimensions of intervention, interaction and participa-tion) defines sound art (or audiovisual art) in publicspace. Its transformational potentiality in a mediumthat is as space-filling as it is transitory qualifies thiskind of art. To be in transition signifies life as a tran-sitional space in which one can continually get lost –and at the same time find oneself again.7

REFERENCES

Klein, G. 2003a. Unter freiem Himmel. In C. Brustle, M.Rebstock, H. Schulze (eds.) Berlin Society of New Music

Yearbook: Music | Politics. Saarbrucken: Pfau.Klein, G. 2003b. Spannungsraume. Einige Uberlegungen

zum Raumbegriff in der Klangkunst (Areas of Tension.

Several Thoughts on the Concept of Space in SoundArt). In G. Nauck (ed.) Positionen No. 54. Muhlenbeck:Positionen.

Klein, G. 2003c. From the Sound Installation to the SoundSituation. On my work transition – Berlin junction. EineKlangsituation. Organised Sound 8(2).

Klein, G. 2005. Dazwischenkommen – Klangkunstlerische

Interventionen im offentlichen Raum. 19. Dresdner Tagefur zeitgenossische Musik (Dresden ContemporaryMusic Days). http://www.georgklein.de/coma-deutsch/

PresseTexte/EinzelTexte/GK-dazwischenkommen/GK-dazwischenkom-Frameset.html.

Klein, G. 2006. Interactive Variation: On the relativity of

sound and movement in ‘transition’ and ‘TRASA’. InC. Mahnkopf (ed.) Electronics in New Music. Heidelberg:Wolke.

Neubaur, C. 2002. Winnicott – Das Leben, ein Uber-gangsraum (Winnicott – Life, a Transitional Space). InG. Klein (ed.) Transition – Berlin Junction. Eine Klang-situation (Transition – Berlin Junction. A sound situa-

tion). Saarbrucken: Pfau.Ruth, U. 2006. Die Vermittlung von Klangkunst. Pra-

sentation als Raumerfahrung (The Communication of

Sound Art. Presentation as Spatial Experience). In G.Weckwerth, M. Osterwold (eds.) Catalogue sonambiente.Heidelberg: Kehrer.

Sanio, S. 2006. Stadt Raum Kontroll Verlust AneignungInteraktion (City Space Control Loss AppropriationInteraction). Berlin: Kunsthochschule Weißensee.

Figure 11. Logo of the fictitious European Border WatchOrganisation, based on the actual Texas Border Watch

Organization, which served as the model for the projecttowersounds.2: Watch Tower (turmlaute.2: Wachturm) in

the border watchtower.

6From the psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott comes the term ‘transi-tional object’, which enables the baby to make the initial transitionfrom its mother to the world, in which the ‘real achievement ofsublimation lies in the creation of transitional space, an ‘‘inter-mediate area’’, a ‘‘potential space’’ ’ (Neubaur 2002).

7Further details on my basic concept of transitions can be found inKlein 2003c.

108 Georg Klein

Sound Art or Klangkunst? A reading of theGerman and English literature on sound art

ANDREAS ENGSTROMy and ASA STJERNA z

ySankt Eriksgatan 114, 113 31 Stockholm, SwedenE-mail: andreas.engstrom@music.su.sezWittstocksgatan 8, 115 24 Stockholm, Sweden, http://www.asastjerna.se

The article is a study on the literature of sound art from two

languange areas, German and English. The text reveals two

different discourses. The German texts on Klangkunst (sound

art in German) focus upon the sound material’s relation to a

spatial location where sound sculptures and installations are

given central focus. These are genres that transcend the old

divisions between spatial arts (Raumkunst) and the time-based

arts (Zeitkunst). A strong emphasis on the dual aspect of seeing

and hearing could be described as a central point of departure.

Klangkunst concerns an investigation of both time and space,

through ear and eye. In the English literature on sound art,

there are often references to sound’s inner aesthetical qualities.

The perspectives on sound’s relation to room is evident also

here, but the perspectives are however broader, in the sense that

the aspects of space and locality are diversified and pluralistic.

One will find an even larger scope of literature and references if

the area of sound art also includes cultural-studies perspectives

on sound, sonic experiences and acoustic phenomena, the influx

of new technologies on the everyday soundscape, and sound

design. These are areas often referred to when speaking about

the ‘sonic turn’. The way the term sound art is handled in

English texts is often very vague. The German study of

Klangkunst developed within the academic field of musicology.

There has been a fruitful collaboration between musicologists,

publishing houses, music journals, galleries, academic

institutions and higher art education, which together has helped

to establish Klangkunst as an artistic expression and theoreticaldiscourse. This strong intellectual infrastructure has been

important in the ‘construction’ of the concept Klangkunst.

The two separate theoretical discourses not only deal with the

concept of sound art differently. Although many of the artists

are dealt with in both the English and the German literature,

there are very seldom references to the German literature in the

English texts. This tendency is not reciprocal.

I

The starting point for this article was a search in themusicological publication archive RILM in September2006.1 The search gave 238 hits for the phrase ‘soundart’. Through a translation function, words synon-ymous with sound art were translated and includedin the search, including terms such as the German

Klangkunst, the French arts sonore, the Swedishljudkonst. Two different languages seemed to dominate:German and English. What seemed to be of specialinterest was that the titles and abstracts indicated dif-ferent academic discourses. The German abstractsleaned towards topics related to spatiality, while theEnglish abstracts could be described as much more‘open’ in the usage of the term sound art, and were moreconnected to the musical tradition. Both terms empha-sise sound as the aesthetic material, but Klangkunstseemed to focus upon the sound material’s relation to aspatial location as the essential component. The litera-ture within the field confirms that the German textson sound art differ in essence from the English.

This text does not focus on sound art itself as anartistic practice; rather, it is intended to be a reading ofthe literature and the academic discourses. By studyinga body of literature within the field, one might attainan understanding for how cultural discourses arecreated and through this obtain perspectives on howartistic fields of activities are defined depending onacademic traditions and spheres of written media.2

II

In the German literature on Klangkunst the majorwork and reference is the anthology Klangkunst –Tonende Objekte, Klingende Raume, from 1999, editedby Helga de la Motte-Haber. This book is one volumeof a total of thirteen in an edition on twentieth-centurymusic. Although Motte-Haber considers Klangkunstas a general, multifaceted concept, the musicologicalidentity is strong, although complemented with an arthistorical perspective.

The anthology takes as its starting point the rela-tionship between the art forms and the developmentof the synaesthetical concept during the nineteenthcentury, and then clearly dissects the twentiethcentury’s expanded concept of art and the so called ‘dis-solution of the art forms’ (Motte-Haber 1999: 11–65).

1This was undertaken as research for an article in the Swedishjournal Nutida Musik, co-written by the authors of this text(Engstrom and Stjerna 2006/07).

2In this text the term sound art is used when referring generally tothe subject. When referring specifically to the English and Germandiscourses, sound art and Klangkunst are used respectively.

Organised Sound 14(1): 11–18 & 2009 Cambridge University Press. Printed in the United Kingdom. doi:10.1017/S135577180900003X

The genre Klangkunst should be seen in the light ofthe traditions of Raumkunst or spatial arts, andZeitkunst, time-based art forms. These two terms canbe traced back to the eighteenth century and theestablishment of aesthetics as a philosophic andacademic discipline. Sculpture and installation belongto the spatial arts, while music, with its performativeact and narrative form belongs to the time-based artforms. With the development of technology in thetwentieth century, these two art forms have changed,in ways that concern not only the technologicalaspect, but the very ontological level of these artforms as well. New aesthetical attitudes have gener-ated new aesthetical expressions, which belong nei-ther to the Raumkunst nor to the Zeitkunst – such asKlangkunst.

Sound sculpture and installations are given centralfocus, and their historical development is presentedin two separate chapters.3 Also ‘sound in public space’is investigated in detail (Follmer 1999). The pointsof departure are the spatially related aspects, such asthe soundscape – but also here, the sound sculptureand the sound installation dominate. Klangkunst is notregarded in terms of being a performative art, andgenres such as radio art and electroacoustic or acous-matic music are not discussed within the volume.

Other articles and anthologies from around the sametime use similar perspectives as in Klangkunst. In anintroduction to an anthology, Sabine Sanio writesabout the changed identity of the spatial and time-based art forms, and stresses that Klangkunst does notmainly involve performativity. ‘The increasing meaningof the spatial dimension corresponds to a relativisationof musical time, which in the concert music is the onlyreal musical dimension. In Klangkunst this cannot beregarded as independent of other aspects, and espe-cially not of the room.’ [Dem Bedeutungszuwachs derraumlichen Dimension entspricht eine Relativierung dermusikalischen Zeit, die in der Konzertmusik als eigen-tliche musikalische Dimension gilt. In der Klangkunstkann sie kaum unabhangig von den anderen Aspektenund insbesondere dem des Raums betrachtet werden.](Sanio 2000: 12). Space and site has through moderntechnology developed from being a container of musicto something that might be articulated through sound.With the possibility of performing music everywhere,at any time and for as long as wanted, using samplingtechniques and movable loudspeakers, sound art hasbeen released from the traditional musical act of per-forming. The concept ‘space’ has changed, from beingan architectonical construction that houses the music

to a possible concept and philosophical phenomenonto be investigated with sound.

Bernd Schulz claims that the development of soundart is to be seen in the light of the expanded conceptof sculpture, and stresses the spatial aspects of an artform that is primarily not music. ‘In the course of thepast two decades, on the frontier between the visualarts and music, an art form has developed in whichsound has become material within the context of anexpanded concept of sculpture’ (Schulz 2002: 14).

The ‘expanding concept of sculpture’, one of thecornerstones in the German discourse, is emphasisedby Helga de la Motte-Haber in the catalogue to theexhibition Sonambiente 1996. In the introduction,Motte-Haber states that Klangkunst does not includenew performative aspects of music. Rather, byemphasising an art historical perspective, and byregarding the art form as the result of an evolutionaryprocess, a new art form has emerged that involvestwo senses, hearing and seeing:

Klangkunst means in the first place not the many musicperformances, for which, with help from synthesisers and

computers, artists develop new instruments that demandnew performing techniques. Music performance might wellhave a place on the vague border with Klangkunst, and it

has also become much broader, following action art.Klangkunst in the narrow sense is, however, mainly definedthrough new aesthetical implications, which have crystal-lised over the course of a long historical process. To this

belongs an abandonment of the strong differentiationbetween spatial and time-based qualities, which hadalready been questioned by the musicalisation of painting

and abolished with the onset of process art. Through this,every purist concept of the artistic material, which assumeda division between the eye and the ear, was dissolved. An

art form emerged that wanted to be heard and seen at thesame time.

[Klangkunst meint nicht in erster Linie die zahlreichenMusikperformances, fur die, durch Syntheziser und Com-puter angeregt, Kunstler neue Instrumente entwickelten, dieindividuelle Spielformen erfodern. Die Musikperformance

kann wohl einen Platz an den unscharfen Randern derKlangkunst haben, und sie hat in der Nachfolge derAktionskunst auch eine starke Erweiterung erfahren.

Klangkunst im engeren Sinne ist jedoch wesentlich durchneue asthetische Implikationen definiert, die sich in einemlangwierigen historischen Prozeß herauskristallisiert haben.

Dazu gehort vor allem die Preisgabe eines strengen Unter-schieds zwischen raumlichen und zeitlichen Qualitaten,der schon durch die Musikalisierung der Malerei fraglich

geworden war und mit der Prozessualisierung der Kunstaufgehoben wurde. Damit aber loste sich auch jenerpuristische Begriff des kunstlerischen Materials auf, der voneiner sinnlichen Trennung von Auge und Ohr ausging. Es

entstand Kunst, die gleichzeitig gehort und gesehen seinwollte.] (Motte-Haber 1996: 16)

In many German texts on Klangkunst, there is astrong emphasis on this dual aspect of seeing and

3Chapter 4 by Frank Gertich is called ‘Klangskulpturen’ (SoundSculptures); Chapter 3 by Martin Supper is about technologicalaspects on installations, ‘Technische Systeme von Klangin-stallationen’; and Chapter 6 is by Motte-Haber: ‘ZwischenPerformance und Installation’ (Between Performance and Instal-lation).

12 Andreas Engstrom and Asa Stjerna

hearing. It thus can be linked both to Raumkunstand to Zeitkunst. It is illuminating that the festivalSonambiente in Berlin 1996 had as its subtitle ‘Festivalfur horen und sehen’ (festival for hearing and seeing).However, it should be pointed out that even though theborders are relatively clear in Motte-Haber’s quotedintroduction, it would be a simplification to claim thatthe German discourse on Klangkunst wholly avoidsthe strictly sound-oriented or performative aspects.Reading through catalogues such as those to theexhibitions Sonambiente 1996 and 2006, the perspec-tives vary in their different contributions. In addition,German Klangkunst studies have from the beginningpaid attention to the discourse on the soundscape. Inthe chapter on sound art in public spaces in Klangkunst(1999), Golo Follmer elaborates on the performativeand interactive perspectives of the city space, with itscommunicative events, as a foundation for artisticpractices: ‘The city is a room of possibilities, a bigchance generator of human encounters, and thisside is also thematised in the arts.’ [Die Stadt ist einMoglichkeitsraum, ein großer Zufallsgenerator mens-chlicher Begegnungen, und auch diese Seite wird vonder Kunst thematisiert.] (Follmer 1999: 194). SabineSanio, apart from pointing out that the time dimen-sion in many installations is as important as thespatial aspect and that the sonic material often has acomplexity on a par with traditional art music, alsocomments upon the importance of the conceptualaspects of sound art. ‘The history of a building or aroom can be made into a theme as well as its originalfunction can. Next to acoustic and visual elements,many sound artists also work with semantic and nar-rative associations.’ [Die Geschichte eines Gebaudes odereines Raums kann ebenso zum Thema werden wie seineursprungliche Funktion. Neben akustischen und visuellenElementen arbeiten viele Klangkunstler auch mit seman-tischen und narrativen Assoziationen.] (Sanio 2000: 14).The integration of the aural and visual is, however,

one of the main themes in the German texts. Motte-Haber claims in several texts that the core of thesound installation is the investigation of both timeand space, through ear and eye, which in turn is thefoundation of our perception of time and space; aperspective that also hints at the author’s backgroundin perception psychology, which is one of the roots ofthe German synaesthetic approach to the genre.

Eye and ear are both more intensely involved in the con-

struction of our views of space and time than the othersense organs are [y] In recent times, materials and thesense-specific stimulations they give rise to have become

the means for the purpose of working with abstractions,namely of working directly with the perception of spaceand time. The intent is to achieve, through intensifications,

disturbances, and blurred transitions, a new contextu-alization of what we take to be the reality of spaces andtimes. Sound installations, whose development took place

at the end of the 20th century [y] are one such intensifi-cation of the perception of time and space. (Motte-Haber

2002: 34)

Thus, when the sound art curator ChristophMetzger in the essay ‘Sounds Typically German –‘‘Klangkunst’’ ’ (apart from the title, which implys theparticularity of the German art), straightforwardlydescribes sound art as ‘a category of installation art,[which] involves working with spaces both acousticallyand sculpturally’ (Metzger 2006: 53), he is in a fewwords summarising the German academic discoursethat developed in a particular historical and academiccontext. Sound installation is not a sound art genreamong others – it is the sound art.

III

To get an overview of the English literature on soundart is a much more complicated matter. The literaturehas a partly different point of departure, namely thesound itself. But above all, the usage of the term isoften vague and one could easily agree with AlanLicht, who writes, ‘there has been a tendency to applythe term ‘‘sound art’’ to any experimental music ofthe second half of the twentieth century, particularlyto John Cage and his descendants’ (Licht 2007: 12).4

In his history of sound art, Background Noise: Per-spectives on Sound Art, Brandon LaBelle takes JohnCage and musique concrete as points of origin: ‘Sincethe early 1950s, sound as an aesthetic category hascontinually gained prominence. Initially through theexperimental music of John Cage and musique concrete,divisions between music and sound stimulated adven-tures in electronics, field recordings, the spatialization ofsonic presentation, and the introduction of alternativeprocedures’ (LaBelle 2006: xii). The expression ‘soundas an aesthetic category’ is emblematic for the Englishliterature on sound art, and so is also the tendency tospeak about a division between music and sounds. Thefocus on sound can also be examplified with whatChristoph Cox sees as a neo-modernist trend in the arts,namely sound art’s focus on the ‘sound-in-itself’ (Cox2003). Cox refers to several artists often consideredsound artists – such as Ryoji Ikeda, Carsten Nicolai,Kim Cascone, Bernhard Gunter and Francisco Lopez –and mainly their pure sound works. These artists aregenerally not always associated with the art music orelectroacoustic community, but rather with ‘alternative’music. It is, however, emblematic that in an art journalsuch as Artforum these sound-oriented artists are usedto exemplify tendencies in the art world, rather thanmusic.

In the English literature, sound art is often con-nected to sound’s inner aesthetical qualities. Sometimes

4See also Lander (1990: 10).

Sound Art or Klangkunst? 13

it is regarded as the musical equivalent of the Duch-ampian ready-made or objet trouve. Sound art is alsoconnected to musique concrete, to Murray Schafer andthe soundscape movement, and to field recordings. Theorigin of the term is often attributed to the Canadiancomposer and writer Dan Lander from the mid-80s. Inthe anthology Sound by Artists from 1990, Landerclaims that artists using sound is not a well-definedmovement, partly because of the many ways sound isused and functions in the different art works:

Although there has been an abundance of activity centredaround explorations into sonic expression, there is nosound art movement, as such. In relation to artists’ works,

sound occupies a multitude of functions and its employ-ment is often coupled with other media, both static andtime-based. As a result, it is not possible to articulate adistinct grouping of sound artists in the way one is able to

identify other art practices. (Lander 1990: 10)

Lander’s anthology covers many sonic expressions,including sound-related video and performance art.This broad and diverse field of activities supportsDouglas Kahn’s thesis that already in the 1980s and1970s, artists from different parts of the world wereinvolved in different kinds of sound art, although usinga variety of terms – such as radio art, audio art andsound art – which all have their own genesis (Kahn2005). Kahn also claims that the general concept‘developed independently around the same time inAustralia among individuals associated with the audioarts at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation andwith students and staff at the University of Technol-ogy, Sydney’ (Kahn 1999: 363–4). Thus, sound artistsstarted their careers at different times and in differentenvironments, long before ‘certain metropolitan artcentres – their markets, institutions and discourses, andonly then a certain subset of those – ‘‘discovered’’ thisthing called sound art’ (Kahn 2005).

Douglas Kahn’s highly influential book, NoiseWater Meat, has the subtitle A History of Sound in theArts. Kahn does not speak explicitly of a sound art.The book traces different aspects of sound and auralityin selected areas from the pre- and early modern artsthrough to the 1960s. Thus sound art, according to itsgeneral sense, lies ahead of the book’s historical scope,but ‘sound in the arts’ is, according to the author, alsoa broader concept, ‘especially when one keeps in mindthe synthetic nature of the arts, i.e., the various inter-secting social, cultural, and environmental realitieswittingly and unwittingly embodied in any one of theinnumerable factors that go into producing, experien-cing, and understanding a particular work. Sound art isa smaller topic’ (Kahn 2005).

Although sound art has not been the only phraseused to describe a certain artistic genre or tendency, itseems as if sound art in the general sense is the mostcommonly used term for describing a field within

contemporary art, music and media art where soundis one of several artistic parameters. This is supportedby Kahn, who also claims that ‘[m]ost artists usingsound use many other materials, phenomena, con-ceptual and sensory modes as well, even where there isonly sound’ (2005). The field could be further extendedif one takes into account marketing strategies forrecord labels (using categories such as ‘minimalist/sound art’ or ‘contemporary classical/sound art’) orhow the term sound art is used in popular media,where it is more or less synonymous with experimentalmusic. Sound art as a general category is introducedrelatively late, but this does not hide the fact that in thegeneral sense, sound art is a very broad area.

In Sound by Artists, Dan Lander writes that‘phonography, as a form of cultural and socialrepresentation, exists in a vacuum, devoid of any sub-stantial critical discourse’ (Lander 1990: 12). This cri-tique pre-echoes the activities of the publishing houseErrant Bodies, which since the mid-1990s has publishedbooks and CDs ‘on sound, auditory issues, spatial artsand design, and cultures of experimental performanceand art y [Errant Bodies] has been at the forefront ofdeveloping and supporting the diverse attitudes towardthe emerging field of sound art, contemporary experi-mental music, and auditory culture’ (Errant Bodies2008). Errant Bodies often combines a focus on soundwith an interest in the site-specific and the relationbetween the two, as well as with the individual in thesocial context. This is explicitly stated in the anthologySite of Sound, in which the editors ‘[draw] attentionto areas of sound-art which aim to engage directly withthe world and social reality. These works do not cutthemselves off from location, INTERFERENCE, orunwanted noise, but rather embrace these elements asan important compositional source’ (LaBelle andRoden 1999). In the anthology Surface Tension, theconcept of site is further elaborated, as well as beingin focus: ‘While the terminology of site appears anddisappears [y] ‘site’ continues to provide a location,both real and imaginary, actualised and theoretical,for considering the physical parameters of place andthe phantasmic projections of what place may signal’(Ehrlich and LaBelle 2003: 11). By focusing on site’sdifferent formations, sound art is further con-ceptualised also through the performative, where ‘theperforming body’ is highlighted in ‘sound works’(Ehrlich and LaBelle 2003: 19) on an accompanyingCD. Sound art according to Errant Bodies embracesa large area of auditory and sonic experiences that gobeyond a more space-oriented German concept aswell as any sound-in-itself-modernism.

One will find an even larger scope of literature andreferences if the area of sound art also includes cul-tural-studies perspectives on sound, sonic experiencesand acoustic phenomena, the influx of new technol-ogies on the everyday soundscape, and sound design.

14 Andreas Engstrom and Asa Stjerna

These areas may be part of the ‘sonic turn’, ‘referringto the increasing significance of the acoustic assimultaneously a site for analysis, a medium foraesthetic engagement, and a model for theorisation’(Drobnick 2004: 10),5 where sound art is one of thekey words.To this field, one might add the books and pub-

lications by David Toop, whose contribution as apropagandist and populariser of experimental music,sound art and auditory cultures should not be under-rated. In the text for the catalogue of the Sonic Boomexhibition in London in 2000, Toop states that soundart is ‘sound combined with visual art practices’. Hegives a historical expose of the development – theFuturist movements, Erik Satie’s musique d’ameuble-ment, John Cage, soundscape – and also the techno-logical development from automata and mechanicalinstruments to the impact of digital information tech-nology on our sonic environment and listening habits:‘[t]his absorption of music into the sonic environment(and the sonic environment into music)’ (Toop 2000:107). Toop also considers electronic club music, noise,the sample and collage techniques of DJing (where‘the authorship of individual tracks began to loseimportance’), and laptop genres (where ‘the old divi-sions between so-called ‘high’ and ‘low’ arts have beenblurred’ (2000: 120)). This emphasis on music’s inter-sections with a variety of fields (caused by the moderntechnological society), and how this becomes an inte-grated part of our daily life, stands in sharp contrastto Motte-Haber’s much more restricted perspective inthe text for the Sonambiente festival in Berlin 1996.

IV

The study of Klangkunst in Germany developedwithin the academic field of musicology [system-atische Musikwissenschaft]. Helga de la Motte-Haber– professor at Technische Universitat, Berlin between1972 and 2004 – has been a key figure. Apart from herown writings, she has educated several disciples who –as theorists, writers and curators – have in their turncontributed to the establishment of not only a Germanscene but also a theoretical discourse. The art form issupported through academic institutions and higherart education. For almost two decades there has beena fruitful collaboration between musicologists, pub-lishing houses, music journals and galleries, whichtogether has helped to establish Klangkunst as animportant artistic expression.6

Within this context, a history of Klangkunst hasemerged with its key artists, landmark exhibitions andcanonised literature. Fur Augen und Ohren 1980, VomHang zum Gesamtkuntwerk 1983, Von Klang derBilder 1985 and Sonambiente 1996 are the exhibitionsmost often referred to.7 The exhibition catalogue ofSonambiente 1996 and the anthology Klangkunst from1999 have helped to establish Klangkunst in the con-sciousness of a broader public. Some of the artistsrecurring in publications and articles are BernhardLeitner, Rolf Julius, Christina Kubisch, Ulrich Eller,Robin Minard, Bill Fontana, Max Neuhaus, Hans-Peter Kuhn, Akio Suzuki and Andreas Oldorp. Farfrom all are Germans, but many have had Germany asa base or worked there with different projects, and theyfit into the German concept of Klangkunst.

These artists are also frequently referred to intexts by non-Germans. For example, the AmericanChristoph Cox focuses in his writing on the Sonam-biente catalogue of 2006 (Cox 2006), as well as onJanet Cardiff, Neuhaus and Kubisch. However, thereis a slight shift of perspective in Cox’s text that isstriking. Cox takes a different look at time in musicand sound art, and reads it through Nietzsche,Bergson and Deleuze. John Cage’s ‘Dekonstruktionder Musik’ from an ontological perspective is adeconstruction of ‘being’ [Sein] and instead this leadsto a suggestion for becoming [Werden]. ‘He turnedagainst the conception of music as Being and claimedsubsequently, that it must become Becoming [y] themusic should be brought in harmony with our post-theological world, a world that is fundamentallyopen, without origin, end or goal.’ [Er wendet sichgegen die Auffassung von Musik als Sein und bestehtdarauf, sie sollte ein Werden werden [y] die Musiksollte mit unserer post-theologischen Welt in Einklanggebracht werden, einer Welt, die im Wesentlichen offenist, ohne Ursprung, Ende oder Ziel.] (Cox 2006: 218).Cox relates this new conception of time, being, tocomposers such as Feldman and Glass, free jazz,experimental music, improvisation and DJ music,

5This anthology is a good example of a type of academic culturalstudies approach to sounds within diverse fields – performancestudies, anthropology, philosophy, cultural studies, and artisticexpressions with sound.6See Metzger (2006). Among the publishing houses that havepublished extensively on sound art, most notably is Kehrer Verlagin Heidelberg, which has collaborated with several German musi-

(F’note continued)cologists, among them Motte-Haber, and also with StadtgalerieSaarbrucken and its curator Bernd Schulz. The singuhr-horgaleri inBerlin (established in 1996) is today one of very few galleries solelydevoted to sound art. The main journals on contemporary music –MusikTexte, Positionen and Neue Zeitschrift fur Musik – publishregularly on Klangkunst, whereas German art magazines Kunst-forum and Texte zur Kunst have been rather silent on on the subjectof sound art. Also note that Alan Licht (2007) identifies Germanyas being central in this respect: ‘Germany, in particular, has becomea world center of sound art activity’. This is written on thepenultimate page (2007: 217). His book in general has a very strongNorth American focus, and he hardly pays attention to the German‘world center’ elsewhere in the book.7The historical connection between these exhibitions in the evolu-tion of Klangkunst can be seen in the contribution from NeleHertling in the catalogue to Sonambiente 2006, in which he makesconnections between the festivals Fur Augen und Ohren, Sonam-biente 1996 and the festival in 2006. Hertling 2006: 388–91.

Sound Art or Klangkunst? 15

and a conception of sound as a continuous flow. Coxfollows how music is becoming sound, and he con-cludes: ‘I have tried to show that during the last fiftyyears – especially in the last decade – an importanttransition has taken place from the traditional con-ception of music to a conception of sound as sound.’[Ich habe versucht zu zeigen, dass im verlauf der letztenfunfzig Jahre – vor allem aber im letzten Jahrzehnt –ein wichtiger Ubergang von der traditionellen Auffas-sung von Musik hin zu einer Konzeption von Klang alsKlang stattgefunden hat.] (2006: 221).

Cox claims that the discourse and praxis of soundart is mainly about room, place and architecture.It is therefore interesting how Cox is focusing on thedeconstruction of time within the context of music –how music is entering a non-teleological processthrough the sound – and not on the area of time-space,as is so often emphasised in the German texts. InsteadCox is criticising the idea of talking about thedichotomy of music and sound art in terms of timeand room (Zeit and Raum) (2006: 220). Althoughreferring to sound art as concerning spatial aspects,the sound art anthologies he refers to are the above-mentioned Errant Bodies publications Site of Soundfrom 1999 (and not Klangkunst from the same year)and Surface Tension (Cox 2006: 219), which, asalready mentioned, are not solely about sound artand its spatial aspects.

A parallel to Cox’s phenomenological frameworkcan be found in Brandon LaBelle’s book BackgroundNoise, which also deals with the expanded concept ofroom. His chronological investigation is not exclusivelyon the acoustical perspective of an architectural room-oriented sound art, but also on sound art’s relationalfunction: ‘It has been my intention to historically followthe developments of sound as an artistic medium whileteasing out sound’s relational lessons. For it teachesus that space is more than its apparent materiality’.LaBelle continues to claim that ‘sound’s relationalcondition can be traced through modes of spatiality, forsound and space in particular have a dynamic rela-tionship’ (LaBelle 2006: ix). LaBelle’s ‘postmodern’approach – where sound art aesthetics, especially in theera of digital technology and networks, means ‘arethinking of sound’s fixity, its location and its specifi-city, as well as what and whom actually produces it’(2006: 258) – does not stand in opposition to the per-spectives in the German literature. LaBelle’s perspectiveis, however, broader in the sense that the aspects ofspace and locality are diversified and pluralistic.

If LaBelle had shown a stronger awareness of theGerman discourse and taken into consideration thelarge body of literature within this field, his bookcould have been read as a critique of the ‘GermanSchool’. The same could be said about Cox, althoughthe size of his article does not allow for further dis-cussions on academic discourses.

There are also different positions within GermanKlangkunst studies. In the proceedings from a con-ference held in connection with an exhibition inNeuen Museum Weserburg Bremen in 2005, soundart is read in the light of new media and the articlesdeal with sound poetry, radio art, text-sound com-positions, sound design for film, and also intermedia.(Thurmann-Jajes, Breitsameter and Pauleit 2006).8

According to one of the editors, sound art ‘designatesindependent works arising from a great number ofmovements all concerned with new, unconventionalways of exploring sound and language as objects and– from the conceptual perspective – with the investi-gation of auditive material’ (Thurmann-Jajes 2006:29). In the art journal Texte zur Kunst’s ‘Sound’ issue(issue 60, December 2005), focus is mainly on sound,and with few exceptions they are not dealing with theroom-oriented Klangkunst discourse and key wordssuch as ‘Horen und Sehen’.

But although Klangkunst today is accepted as a termand genre, to the point where these types of diver-gences from a relatively congruent German discourseare obvious, the concept has its evolution and also apoint of origin. In her early text from 1986, BarbaraBarthelmes discusses the works of Bill Fontana,Bernhard Leitner and Julius in terms of beingKlangskulpturen, or sound sculptures (Barthelmes1986). The word Klangkunst is not mentioned in thetext. Not until a few years later does the concept ofKlangkunst begin to appear in the German literature.9

Barbara Barthelmes, who in the late 1990s com-mented on the way Klangkunst was launched as a newart form (Barthelmes 1999: 117–36), claims in a morerecent text that this defining and categorising had animportant function in making the artistic expressionsvisible to the public and to the institutions. ‘Theformulation of this concept facilitated a wider base ofreference to the phenomenon, with all conceivablecontractions of content. This smoothed the way forits integration into the institutional context, helpingthe artists and composers and their genre-crossingworks – sound sculptures, environments and perfor-mances – to come to the notice of the public and thusbecome exploitable, which often is the equivalent tosurvival’ (Barthelmes 2006: 48).

Apart from paying attention to the relative youthof the word Klangkunst, Volker Straebel points outthe political implications not only in acknowledging

8The publication is in both German and English. In the Germanversion of Thurmann-Jajes’ article ‘Sound Art’, the English phrase‘sound art’ is also used.9Note that the two publications by Motte-Haber from 1996 and1999 are simply named Klangkunst, while the important fore-runners – such as the exhibition catalogue to Fur Augen undOhren, 1980, Musik und Bildende Kunst. Von der Tonmalerei zurKlangskulptur (Motte-Haber 1990) – and the later Vom Klang derBilder (Maur 1999) do not have the word Klangkunst in their titles.

16 Andreas Engstrom and Asa Stjerna

Klangkunst as a movement but also in lending itthe status of a genre (Gattung). This process beganin the mid-1990s in connection with the festivalSonambiente 1996 and was further demonstratedwith the publication of the anthology Klangkunst in1999.

Helga de la Motte-Haber’s project, in 1996, in connec-

tion to the festival Sonambiente, to establish Klangkunstas an independent genre, was most disputed at the time.Today, when the big festivals for new music usually alsopresent sound installations, single institutions like gal-

leries and competitions are founded and devoted solelyto sound art, and when there even are courses for soundart, this thrust appears as consequent in the frame of the

effort to establish theoretical and art political sound art.

[Das Projekt Helga de la Motte-Habers, 1996 im

Zusammenhang mit dem Festival Sonambiente dieKlangkunst als eigenstandige Gattung zu etablieren, wardamals hochst umstritten. Heute, da die großen Festivals

Neues Musik fur gewohnlich auch Klanginstallationenprasentieren, einzig der Klangkunst verpflichtete Institu-tionen wie Galerien und Wettbewerbe gegrundet wurdenund es sogar Studiengange fur Klangkunst gibt, erscheint

dieser Vorstoß als konsequent im Rahmen des Versuchs,die Klangkunst kunsttheoretisch und kunstpolitisch zubegrunden.] (Straebel 2004)

Through the literature, there has been a process of‘constructing’ Klangkunst and sound art. The con-struction of the German Klangkunst is, however, moreobvious than the process of acknowledging sound art.We have already touched upon the explanations: theexceptionally strong intellectual infrastructure as isthe case in Germany, which could be contrasted to thebroad origin of the English term.The importance attributed in Germany to the

Sonambiente exhibition in 1996 has a parallel in thereception of the Sonic Boom exhibition at the HaywardGallery in London in 2000. Sonic Boom even has areputation as the exhibition that launched sound artto the world, a view criticised by, for example, DouglasKahn.10 However, it seems as if a generally broadconcept of sound art, which also includes aspects ofexperimental or alternative music, has penetrated musicjournalism.11 This broad perspective characterisedSonic Boom and also other large exhibitions at aroundthe same time, such as Sonic Process in Barcelona andParis 2002–03: an exhibition that, although presenting

installations, was about ‘examin[ing] electronic musiccreation from the past ten years and its relationship tothe visual arts’ (van Assche 2002: 5).12

The different approaches to sound art presented inthis text have their advantages and disadvantages aswell as biases. Some of the German texts hang on toold-fashioned musicology, and in terms of referencescan be a bit outdated; even though they are aboutspace, the site-specific and the public environment,they are not really up to date with contemporarydiscussions on site specificity. Several English texts,on the other hand, are more updated with con-temporary art philosophical references, thereby beingcloser both to contemporary art studies and even tothe ‘new musicology’. The German discourse hasused rather sharp tools in acknowledging and defin-ing, and constructing, an important art movement.The way the term sound art is handled in Englishtexts is, on the other hand, often very vague, to thepoint of being useless.

Art does not have any real language borders, but as adiscourse it relies on institutions, which are shaped bytheir respective cultural and linguistic area. In the areaof sound art, the artists that are being canonisedare more or less the same regardless of language area. Itis therefore very interesting to consider the point ofreferences within the different intellectual traditions.Most major English texts, books, anthologies andarticles have hardly any references to any German texts,or to texts in other languages for that matter. Thistendency is not reciprocal. It seems to be a strikinglogic, and the few times German texts appear asreferences in English texts it is on those rare occasionswhen the text in question is translated into English.Obviously, there is some kind of language barrier,which of course looks different from one author tothe other. And who is to blame: the Germans forwriting in German and not translating their texts, orthe English-speaking writers who do not read Germantexts, ignore them, or do not know about them?

Having English as a native language is always anadvantage, and this is also the case in the academicworld. Producing a text in English without theslightest process of translation is to be in command ofthe thought. English as lingua franca can of coursenot overcome the fact that there are 100,000,000Europeans who have German as their native tongue,and, in this context, German will never be a sub-ordinate language. But the stronger English gets, themore isolated German, as well as other languages in‘the rest of the world’, becomes. The authors of this

10‘One New York sound artist said that sound art started aroundthe year 2000, while in London, it is supposed to have jumped offwith the Hayward Gallery exhibition Sonic Boom. Such repre-sentations seem odd to many artists from Continental Europe, theNordic nations, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Mexico,and even to Americans outside the art market purview of a discretecommercial sector of New York City’ (Kahn 2005).11The monthly magazine The Wire has been crucial in this process.To this one could probably add the anthologies Undercurrents(Young 2002) and Audioculture (Cox and Warner 2004).

12Interestingly, in this text with its lack of perspective on thedevelopment of sound art as a space-oriented art form, ‘sound-based expressions’ which ‘never found [their] place in a museum’are exemplified by musicians such as Tony Conrad, Terry Riley, LaMonte Young, Patti Smith and Laurie Anderson (van Assche2002: 5).

Sound Art or Klangkunst? 17

text do not have German or English as mother tongue.We are Swedes and consequently belong to ‘the rest ofthe world’. With very few exceptions, in the area ofsound art in Sweden, the references are English and theawareness of the German discourse is almost zero.13

The anglification of the academic world is an undis-putable fact. It helps to bring research areas closer toone another, but there is also an obvious counter-movement, which tends to separate discourses andthereby makes the world a little poorer.

REFERENCES

Assche, Christine van (ed.). 2002. Sonic Process. A new geo-graphy of sounds. Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani

de Barcelona.Barthelmes, Barbara. 1986. Musik und Raum – ein

Konzept der Avantgarde. Musik und Raum. Basel: GS-Verlag.

Barthelmes, Barbara. 1999. Klangkunst – eine neue Gat-tung oder ein interdisziplinares Feld? In Jorg Stelkensand Hans G. Tillmann (eds.) KlangForschung ’98.

Saarbrucken: PFAU Verlag.Barthelmes, Barbara. 2006. Sound Art in Musicological

Discourse – From Synaesthesia as a Symbol-Forming

Process to Sound Art as a Genre. In Anne Thurmann-Jajes, Sabine Breitsameter and Winfried Pauleit (eds.)Sound Art – Zwischen Avantgarde und Popkultur.Cologne: Salon Verlag.

Cox, Christoph. 2003. Return to Form: Christoph Cox onneo-modernist sound art. Artforum (November).

Cox, Christoph. 2006. Von Musik zum Klang – Sein als

Zeit in der Klangkunst. In Helga de la Motte-Haber,Matthias Osterwold and Georg Weckwerth (eds.) Sonam-biente Berlin 2006: Klangkunst Sound Art. Heidelberg:

Kehrer Verlag.Cox, Christoph and Warner, Daniel (eds.). 2004. Audio

Culture. New York: Continuum.

Drobnick, Jim. 2004. Listening Awry. In Jim Drobnick(ed.) Aural Cultures. Toronto and Banff: YYZ Books/WPG Editions.

Ehrlich, Ken and LaBelle, Brandon. 2003. Surface

Tension: Problematics of site. Los Angeles: ErrantBodies Press.

Engstrom, Andreas and Stjerna, Asa. 2006/07. Ljudkonst –

den svenska modellen [Sound Art – the Swedish Model].Nutida Musik 4/1.

Errant Bodies, 2008. http://www.errantbodies.org/

main.html (accessed 11 August 2008).Follmer, Golo. 1999. Klangorganisation in offentlischen

Raum [Sound Organisation in Public Spaces]. In Helgade la Motte-Haber (ed.) Klangkunst – Tonende Objekte,

Klingende Raume, Handbuch der Musik im 20. Jahrhun-dert, Bd 12. Laaber: Laaber-Verlag.

Hertling, Nele. 2006. Ein Ruckblick ‘Fur Augen undOhren’ 1980/‘Sonambiente festival fur horen und sehen

1996’. In Helga de la Motte-Haber, Matthias Osterwoldand Georg Weckwerth (eds.). Sonambiente Berlin 2006:Klangkunst Sound Art. Heidelberg: Kehrer Verlag.

Kahn, Douglas. 1999. Noise Water Meat: A history ofsound in the arts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Kahn, Douglas. 2005. Sound Art, Art, Music. The Iowa

Review Web 7(1) (August). http://www.uiowa.edu/, iareview/mainpages/new/feb06/kahn.html (accessed11 August 2008).

LaBelle, Brandon. 2006. Background Noise: Perspectives on

Sound Art. New York: Continuum.LaBelle, Brandon and Roden, Steve (eds.). 1999. Site of

Sound: Of architecture and the ear. Los Angeles: Errant

Bodies Press/Smart Art Press.Lander, Dan (ed.). 1990. Sound by Artists. Toronto: Art

Metropole/Walter Phillips Gallery.

Licht, Alan. 2007. Sound Art. Beyond music, between cate-gories. New York: Rizzoli International Publications.

Maur, Karin von. 1999. Vom Klang der Bilder. Munich.

Metzger, Christoph. 2006. Sounds Typically German –Klangkunst. World New Music Magazine 16.

Motte-Haber, Helga de la. 1990. Musik und Bildende Kunst.Von der Tonmalerei zur Klangskulptur. Laaber: Laaber-

Verlag.Motte-Haber, Helga de la. 1996. Klangkunst – eine neue

Gattung? In Akademie der Kunste Berlin (ed.) Klang-

kunst. Munich: Prestel.Motte-Haber, Helga de la (ed.). 1999. Klangkunst – Tonende

Objekte, Klingende Raume, Handbuch der Musik im 20.

Jahrhundert, Bd 12. Laaber: Laaber-Verlag.Motte-Haber, Helga de la. 2002. Esthetic Perception in

New Artistic Contexts: Aspects – hypotheses – unfin-

ished thoughts’. In Bernd Schulz (ed.). Resonanzen/Resonancen – Aspekte der Klangkunst/Aspects of SoundArt. Heidelberg: Kehrer Verlag.

Motte-Haber, Helga de la, Osterwold, Matthias and

Weckwerth Georg (eds.). 2006. Sonambiente Berlin2006: Klangkunst Sound Art. Heidelberg: Kehrer Verlag.

Sanio, Sabine. 2000. Aspekte der Klangkunst. In Sabine

Sanio, Bettina Wackernagel and Jutta Ravenna (eds.)Musik im Dialog III. Klangkunst, Musiktheater. Jahr-buch der Berliner Gesellschaft fur Neue Musik 1999.

Saarbrucken: PFAU Verlag.Schulz, Bernd (ed.). 2002. Resonanzen/Resonancen –

Aspekte der Klangkunst/Aspects of Sound Art. Heidel-berg: Kehrer Verlag.

Straebel, Volker. 2004. Der Begriff der Klangkunst alsWissenschaftsgeschichtliches Konstrukt. Lecture at theSymposium Klangraum/Raumklang 2004, Cologne.

Toop, David. 2000 ‘Sonic Boom’. Sonic Boom: the Art ofSound. London: Hayward Gallery Publishing.

Thurmann-Jajes, Anne. 2006. Sound Art. In Anne Thur-

mann-Jajes, Sabine Breitsameter and Winfried Pauleit(eds.) Sound Art – Zwischen Avantgarde und Popkultur.Cologne: Salon Verlag.

Thurmann-Jajes, Anne, Breitsameter, Sabine and Pauleit,Winfried (eds.). 2006. Sound Art – Zwischen Avantgardeund Popkultur. Cologne: Salon Verlag.

Young, Rob (ed.). 2002. Undercurrents. New York:

Continuum/The Wire.

13Exception from this tendency is the Sound Art issue of theSwedish music journal Nutida Musik (Engstrom and Stjerna 2006/07), in which the German and English discourses are discussed, anda forthcoming anthology from Raster forlag, edited by AndreasEngstrom and Asa Stjerna.

18 Andreas Engstrom and Asa Stjerna

Sound Art: Origins, development andambiguities

ALAN LICHT

148 Conselyea St. #3R, Brooklyn, New York 11211, USAE-mail: alicht1@earthlink.net

This article provides an overview of sound art, encompassing

its history and artistic development, and the complexities

of the term’s use as a categorisation. It starts with various

definitions employed and the ways that recent museum

exhibitions have left the genre’s parameters seemingly open-

ended, as well as the problems to be faced in finding a ‘frame’

for sound in an exhibition setting. The article then lays out

the roots of the form’s aesthetics, including the disjunction

between sound and image afforded by the invention of

recording, musique concrete, and spatialised composition

through the centuries. Sound art’s relationships to the 60s

art movement Earthworks, ambient music, sound by visual

artists, architecture, sound sculpture, surveillance, sound

design and sound ecology are explored to contextualise its

significance not only to different disciplines within the arts to

but sound’s place in contemporary society. At the conclusion,

two recent works by D.A.M.A.G.E. and David Byrne,

which loom somewhere in-between music and sound art, are

considered in light of the increasingly fluid interpretation

of sound art’s identity.

1. INTRODUCTION

Sound art holds the distinction of being an artmovement that is not tied to a specific time period,geographic location or group of artists, and was notnamed until decades after its earliest works wereproduced. Indeed, the definition of term remainselusive. Bernd Schulz has written of it as ‘an art formy in which sound has become material within thecontext of an expanded concept of sculpture y forthe most part works that are space-shaping andspace-claiming in nature’ (Schulz 2002: 14). DavidToop has called it ‘sound combined with visual artpractices’ (Toop 2000: 107). The glossary of theanthology Audio Culture describes it as a ‘generalterm for works of art that focus on sound and areoften produced for gallery or museum installation’(Cox and Warner 2004: 415). Bill Fontana hasreferred to his sound installations and real-timetransmissions as ‘sound sculptures’ but that term hasalso been applied to sound-producing visual works byHarry Bertoia, the Baschet Brothers, and many oth-ers. Unlike music, which has a fixed time duration(usually calculated around a concert programmelength, or more recently the storage capacity of LP,

tape, or compact disc formats), a sound art piece, likea visual artwork, has no specified timeline; it can beexperienced over a long or short period of time,without missing the beginning, middle or end.

2. RECENT EXHIBITIONS AND

DIFFICULTIES IN CURATION AND

PRESENTATION

The term itself dates back to William Hellermann’sSoundArt Foundation, founded in the late 1970s,which produced a 1983 exhibition at the SculptureCenter in New York, Sound/Art. It gained currency inthe mid- to late 1990s, when I first heard it, startingperhaps with the first Sonambiente festival in 1996,culminating in three important shows in the year2000: Sonic Boom: The Art of Sound, curated byToop at the Hayward Gallery in London; Volume: ABed of Sound, curated by Elliott Sharp and AlannaHeiss at PS1, New York; and I Am Sitting In ARoom: Sound Works by American Artists 1950–2000,curated by Stephen Vitiello as part of the AmericanCentury exhibition, Whitney Museum, New York.The Hayward show particularly reflected the mixbetween the art world and the fashionable electronicamusic scene of the 1990s, with Brian Eno, Scanner,Pan Sonic, Paul Schultze and Ryoji Ikeda included,while the PS1 threw experimental musicians from therock (Lou Reed, the Residents, Cibo Matto) and jazz(Ornette Coleman, Muhal Richard Abrams, ButchMorris) worlds alongside longstanding sound instal-lationists such as Max Neuhaus (who wrote a notefor the exhibition (Neuhaus 2000) disparaging atendency to ‘call what is essentially new musicsomething else – ‘‘Sound Art.’’ y Aesthetic experi-ence lies in the area of fine distinction, not thedestruction of distinctions for promotion of activitieswith their least common denominator, in this case,sound. Much of what has been called ‘‘Sound Art’’has not much to do with either sound or art’). I AmSitting in A Room, by including time-based pieces bycomposers such as John Cage, Philip Glass, GlennBranca, Meredith Monk, Steve Reich and LaurieAnderson, made to be heard in performance or on a

Organised Sound 14(1): 3–10 & 2009 Cambridge University Press. Printed in the United Kingdom. doi:10.1017/S1355771809000028

recording, further blurred the distinctions betweensound art and experimental music.

Of course, Steve Reich and Philip Glass presentedconcerts at the Whitney in the early 1970s, and LaurieAnderson performed in galleries later in that decade;but the question remains, does a piece of musicbecome sound art simply when it’s presented in amuseum? The Whitney survey followed a concertprogramme format, even though it only presentedrecordings (many, but not all, commercially available),but if the pieces had been presented as installations,would that have ‘elevated’ them to sound art status?If a DVD of David Lynch’s 1978 film Eraserhead wasshown as an installation, would that then become‘video art’? I think not.

Museums are still working out effective ways toexhibit sound works. In the New Museum’s Unmo-numental (2008), which examined contemporary col-lage, there were separate sculptural, two-dimensional,online and sound components. The sound pieces wereplayed over loudspeakers but not identified otherthan a back announcement at the piece’s conclusion,which was fairly inaudible above the din of themuseum’s visitors. The works were reduced toanonymous background music. In PS1’s OrganizingChaos (2007), the high-volume soundtrack of Chris-tian Marclay’s video Guitar Drag was audible inevery other room of the exhibition, providing anunwitting soundtrack to the rest of the show, even toother sound pieces or films or videos that had theirown soundtracks (Marclay perhaps took this intoconsideration in curating Ensemble at the ICAPhiladelphia (also 2007), in which he wisely putmultiple sound sculptures in one large room andhad them create their own collective, ever-changingsound environment). In Jane and Louise Wilson’s2008 sound installation The Silence is Twice as FastBackwards at the 303 Gallery in New York, thepiece is heard throughout the space, even as a visitorwalks past the keyboard clicking and chatter of thegallery’s reception desk, surely an unwanted sonicoverlay. For all the interest in sound art, there is stilllittle effort made in exhibitions to distinguish it frommusic in a decorative mode and present sound worksas self-contained pieces.

3. AESTHETIC PRECURSORS TO

SOUND ART

The roots of sound art lie in the disjunction of soundand image afforded by the inventions of the tele-phone and audio recording as well as the ages-oldnotion of acoustic space. With the experience ofhearing each other’s voices as well as other soundsdivorced from their source, sound became an evermore instantaneous identifier as image had been. In1925 Kurt Weill called for an ‘absolute radio’ as an

answer to silent films, which consisted of montages ofpure images, consisting of noises, sounds of nature,and ‘unheard sounds’ (Freire 2003: 69). Futurist F.T.Marinetti’s radio sintesi, an audio montage of sounds,was made around the same time, and in 1929 WalterRuttman created Weekend, an 11-minute response tofilmic ‘city symphonies’ that brought together varioussounds documented in one weekend in Berlin. Bythe late 1940s and early 1950s, Pierre Schaeffer andPierre Henry were taking recordings of documentarysounds and processing them to the point of unrec-ognisability, divorcing them even further from theiroriginal source and initiating the genre of musiqueconcrete. The other value of recording tape, besidesits malleability, was its capacity for repetition, notonly by rewinding and playing a recording over againbut by forming tape loops in which the machinewould play a given section of tape over and overwithout interruption. Such repetition made possiblethe sort of close study of sounds that one wouldusually associate with a frozen visual image, or withthe notation of specific pitches in a musical score.

This sort of careful attention to sound has anantecedent in spatialised music composition and theattention to acoustic design in architecture. Bill Violahas written that ‘ancient architecture abounds withexamples of remarkable acoustic design – whisperinggalleries where a bare murmur of a voice materializesat a point hundreds of feet away across the hall or theperfect clarity of the Greek amphitheaters where aspeaker, standing at a focal point created by thesurrounding walls, is heard distinctly by all membersof the audience’ (Viola 1990: 41). Certain buildings’echo effects provide a precursor to the tape loop;Bernhard Leitner cites the example of the TajMahal’s ‘huge empty domed space above the crypt.The mass, the weight of the walls, the shape anddimensions of the dome y and the extremely hardand polished surfaces y sustain a tone for up totwenty-eight seconds. In this space, a simple melodyplayed on a flute will interweave with itself, goingon and on to become an almost timeless sound’(Conrads 1985). In the sixteenth century, composerGiovanni Gabrieli composed for St Mark’s Basilicain Venice, which had two choir lofts and two organsfacing each other. Such methods were increasinglylost as opera houses and concert halls were developedin the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, wherethe sound simply emanated from a central stage. Inthe middle of the twentieth century, Henry Brantbegan to compose spatially; his Antiphony 1 (1953) isscored for five orchestras spread across the stage andauditorium. Karlheinz Stockhausen followed bycomposing the electronic piece Gesang der Junglinge(1956), a tape piece for voices and electronics thatutilised five loudspeakers spread throughout theconcert hall.

4 Alan Licht

4. DEVELOPMENT OF SOUND

INSTALLATION AND SOUND

ENVIRONMENTS

The two strains of disjunctive sound and spatialisationwere brought together in the Philips Pavilion at the1958World’s Fair. Edgard Varese’s Poeme electronique,an electronic composition, and Iannis Xenakis’ ConcretPH, a tape piece made from the sounds of burning coal,were played repeatedly as an installation through 450loudspeakers inside the Pavilion, which was designedby Le Corbusier (assisted by Xenakis). Slides and filmswere also shown, making it a multi-media spectacle,but it was also the first significant sound installation.Yasunao Tone had a sound installation in a Tokyogallery four years later – a tape recorder playing a loop,hidden beneath a white cloth (to disguise the physicalsource of the sound). That year, 1962, was also whenLa Monte Young formulated the idea of a DreamHouse, a building in which continuous sustained toneswould be heard in perpetuity, something he put intopractice by running sine tones in own loft 24 hours aday in the mid-1960s, and ultimately realised in long-term locations at 6 Harrison St and 275 Church St inNew York.One of Young’s friends in California was future land

artist Walter De Maria, and the two continued theirassociation when both relocated to New York in thevery early 1960s. De Maria’s early written sketchesfor earthworks, such as Beach Crawl and Art Yardappear alongside Young’s conceptual pieces (instruct-ing performers to feed a piano a bale of hay, build afire in front of the audience, or set butterflies free in theconcert hall); his 1962 Two Parallel Lines (of chalk,realised in the Nevada desert some years later) resem-bles Young’s Composition 1960 #10, which read ‘Drawa straight line and follow it’. De Maria also introducedYoung to his own benefactor, Heiner Friedrich. Frie-drich’s gallery realised both De Maria’s Earth Room, inwhich two feet of dirt covers the gallery floor, and ashort-term Dream House, which of course fills a roomwith sound.Nor was this the only similarity between earth-

works of the late 1960s and 1970s and the early soundart works of the same time period. The translocationof Robert Smithson’s non-sites, in which he took soilfrom various locations and re-situated it in galleries,is particularly felt in Maryanne Amacher’s City Linksseries begun in 1967, in which sounds from urbanenvironments were transmitted in real time toanother location, sometimes an exhibition space butlater her own home studio; Bill Fontana’s KirribilliWharf (1976), an eight-channel sound installationmade from sounds captured in an Australian pier;and Annea Lockwood’s Piano Transplants, in whichpianos were partially buried in her English garden orsubmerged in a pond (in Amarillo Texas, also the site

of the Ant Farm’s Cadillac Ranch, a series of Cadillacsplanted nose-first into the ground). Bruce Nauman’sUntitled Piece (1970) instructed drilling a hole a mileinto the earth and placing a microphone inside, whichwould feed into an amplifier and a speaker in anempty room. Alan Sonfist’s Time Landscape (1965),which took an abandoned lot in downtown New Yorkand re-created its rock and soil formations fromcenturies before, is reminiscent of later sound workssuch as Hans Peter Kuhn’s installation at the closedsteelworks Volklinger Hutte (of sounds recordedwhen it was still operating) or Ron Kiuvila’s instal-lation at Mass MoCA (which recreates the sounds ofthe factory its building once was).

Max Neuhaus, who like these other artists workedwith sound from environment and as environment, isalso a pioneering example of an instrumentalist whoabandoned performance completely to work withsound as an ‘entity’. A percussionist who became anacclaimed performer of experimental music by JohnCage, Morton Feldman, Stockhausen, among others,by the mid-1960s he was conducting Field TripsThrough Found Sound Environments, leading audiencesfrom a meeting place at a concert hall to power andsubway stations to listen to the sounds found there.In his Water Whistle pieces, listeners heard soundsproduced by jets of water by lying on their backs inswimming pools and putting their heads under water.Friedrich’s Dia Art Foundation maintains his instal-lation in New York’s Times Square, a soothing droneplacing under the grating of a pedestrian triangle.

A little over a decade after Neuhaus started hisfield trips, German flautist Christina Kubisch leftperformance behind in favour of doing soundinstallations, at first constructing wire reliefs moun-ted on walls and a speakerless sound system thatutilised magnetic induction, with the sounds heardthrough receivers or, later, cordless headphones. RolfJulius emerged in Germany around the same time asKubisch; he was not formerly a musician at all but avisual artist. Early works such as Music for a FrozenLake, in which he played a tape of piano soundsbeside a frozen lake, or Desert Piece show an affinitywith land art; he is best known for his works using‘small sounds’, placing small speakers on stones,bowls, flower pots or glass to make them vibrate,using chirps, whirrs and drones playing through thespeakers at a low volume. Julius would prove highlyinfluential to latter-day sound artists such as StephenVitiello (whose wave form series, in which he hangsspeakers in a wave form as they pulse with subsonicfrequencies, seems particularly indebted to Julius)and Steve Roden (who describes his own sound worldas ‘lowercase’). Julius’ and Kubisch’s activities laidthe groundwork for their homeland’s current statusas a centre for sound art, boasting not only themonth-long Sonambiente festival but several galleries

Sound Art 5

that showcase sound works (Singhur, Galerie RachaelHaferkamp, Stadtgalerie Saarbrucken), an Institue forSound Art in Hamburg, an online magazine ModerneKlangkunst, and an audio magazine, Because TomorrowComes.

5. SOUND ART AND AMBIENT MUSIC

At the same time that Kubisch and Julius weremoving towards sound installation, rock producerand performer Brian Eno was developing his conceptof ambient music. Informed by the ‘music of knivesand forks’ of Erik Satie (not to mention his epicrepetitive work, Vexations (1893), in which a melodyand its two harmonisations are repeated over 800times), Eno created instrumental pieces with an eyetowards ‘building up a small but versatile catalogueof environmental music suited to a wide variety ofmoods and atmospheres’. While much sound artsought to place emphasis on examining the sounds,Eno felt ambient music ‘must be as ignorable as it isinteresting’ (Eno 1978). This was realised on a seriesof albums in the late 1970s and early 1980s, includingDiscreet Music, Music for Airports (initially aninstallation at New York’s LaGuardia airport) andOn Land; these found little audience with Eno’sprogressive rock fan base at the time, but by the early1990s Aphex Twin and other electronic artists haddeveloped Eno’s ideas into a niche market, withdance clubs creating ‘ambient chill-out rooms’ inwhich club-goers could just sit and listen to driftingelectronic soundscapes. Much of the alignment (orconfusion, depending on your perspective) betweensound art and electronica stems from this period,where it would be admittedly easy, on first glance, todraw parallels between the ambient chill-out roomand the sound installation in a gallery, and ambientmusic’s emphasis on environment as opposed tomelody, harmony or conservative musical structureof any kind. Yet ambient was meant to decorate aroom, not redefine it; it was perhaps a commerciali-sation of some of sound art’s concerns, not anextension or a mirror of them. At the same time, boththe ambient chill-out room and a sound art installa-tion can provide a respite from an urban environ-ment, as an atrium would – the sounds are oftenmeant to evoke natural settings.

Ryoji Ikeda, Carsten Nicolai, DJ Spooky andScanner went back and forth between the art andelectronic music worlds, also attracting experimentalmusic fans and more adventurous underground rocklisteners. Working with digital detritus – glitches,clicks, and buzzes – they also produce small sounds(albeit sometimes heavily amplified). But at movingparties such as New York’s Soundlab, sound wouldalso be created in various corners of the room – a kindof spatialisation, even if the room’s specific acoustic

were not necessarily accounted for. Soundlab’sco-founder, Beth Coleman, told Philadelphia’s CityPaper, ‘I have a friend who lives on the east side near abig power plant. One morning she was walking homefrom one of our shows, and she heard the hum of thatplant and it sounded like music to her’ (Adams 1997).This fulfills John Cage’s desire that all sounds belistened to as music, as well as recalling Neuhaus’ fieldtrips. DJing was also viewed as live aural collage, as inthe Happenings of the 1960s, and even referred to assound sculpture (yet another definition) by DJ Spooky(a more compelling argument could be found in thework of Christian Marclay, who creates ‘recycledrecord’ sculptures by breaking records apart and glu-ing different pieces back together and then DJing withthe results, rather than Spooky’s own cut-up sound-scapes). And the crossover continues to be felt asrecently as Christina Kubisch’s Invisible/Inaudible:Five Electrical Walks CD (2007), in which she usesrecordings of her ‘electrical walks’ (where pedestriansequipped with magnetic induction headphones pickup otherwise inaudible electric signals that are con-verted into sound, to create studio compositions thatemphasise rhythms created by the signals and couldeasily be associated with electronic instruments), andStephen Vitiello’s Listening to Donald Judd CD (also2007), in which Vitiello takes field recordings ofhimself ‘playing’ Donald Judd sculptures at MarfaTexas (i.e. extracting sound from them by physicallyhitting them or interacting with them) and then dropsbeats into the mix later in the studio.

In these cases, a sound art piece or gesture becomesmaterial for a music composition. Vitiello andKubisch were both instrumentalists and composersbefore turning their attention to sound art activity,and both have consistently released recordings oftheir work throughout their careers. Earlier soundartists such as Maryanne Amacher and YasunaoTone resisted recording and releasing their workbecause they felt its spatiality would be lost in astereo recording, although both have released CDssince the late 1990s; Trimpin and Bernhard Leitnerhave not recorded their installation work at all. Thetime limitations of vinyl records also discouraged themand other artists who were working with installationsthat were intended to be free of such constraints. Thisalso correlates to video art, where releasing a videoart piece commercially would devalue it and erase itsidentity as an installation work (of course, sound artis even more ephemeral, and therefore difficult tocollect, than video art). It should be noted, however,that galleries have released records by visual artistsas a kind of multiple; and that Brian Eno has writtenthat the introduction of studio effects to create theillusion of space, such as echo, has brought ‘theprocess of making music much closer to the processof painting’ (Eno 1996: 294).

6 Alan Licht

This points to the ongoing intermingling of aestheticsbetween visual art and music that has persisted forcenturies. The acceptance of sound art within the artworld may be due in part to an increasing feeling thatexhibitions or events dealing with sound or music(particularly rock music) will bring people into muse-ums, but the obscure history of sound works by visualartists also helped pave the way. In the Dada era,Marcel Duchamp made three music compositionsthat pre-date Cage’s chance music by decades, whileRaoul Hausmann initiated sound poetry, a powerfuldisruption of language that is still overlooked inModernist histories. Later, Jean Dubuffet carried hisArt Brut practice into improvised cacophony with avariety of instruments, and Yves Klein translated hismonochrome paintings into a ‘Symphony of Mono-tone-Silence’, which sustained a single chord and asilence for an equal period of time. Fluxus, as a kindof neo-Dada movement, produced a great deal ofmusic performances and scores by Yoko Ono, Young,Philip Corner, Nam June Paik, Takehisa Kosugi, DickHiggins, Wolf Vostell, and many others, while VitoAcconci used sound extensively in his installation piecesof the 1970s. Artists such as Ono, Laurie Anderson,Julian Schnabel, Rodney Graham and Fischerspoonerhave also made bids for crossover pop success, withvarying degrees of acceptance from the art world.

6. SOUND ART AND ARCHITECTURE

Beyond finding inspiration from the outdoor envir-onment, sound art has also served to articulate indoorspaces. In Alvin Lucier’s classic tape piece I Am Sittingin a Room (1970) Lucier records and re-records thesound of his own voice, playing the results back into aroom over and over until what is heard is no longer thesound of his voice but that of the room’s resonances,retaining the rhythms of his speech. While formally aprocess music work like Steve Reich’s early phasepieces, its culmination is an example of sound art, asLucier shifts the focus from the voice (the ‘music’ as itwere) to the performance space itself.Bernhard Leitner is a trained architect, who has

worked with sound installations since the early 1970s.In his Sound Cube (1968, realised 1980) he had a setof speakers on six walls sending sounds travellingthrough the rooms, making aural lines, circles andplanes; in Sound Field IV ten loudspeakers are placedon the floor and covered with stone slabs, keeping thesound low to the ground and giving the listener thesensation of wading through sound waves.Maryanne Amacher has noted the difference between

‘structure-borne sound’, which travels ‘through walls,floors, rooms, corridors’ and ‘airborne sound’, which isexperienced by standing before a loudspeaker (Durner1989: 29). In her Music for Sound-Joined Rooms, anongoing series begun in 1980, she studied specific

buildings’ architectural features and then created‘sonic events’ for each room, hallway and staircase.

7. SOUND SCULPTURE AND THE LATENCY

OF SOUND

Sound sculpture – i.e. sculpture produced with aninherent sound-producing facility, as opposed to amusical instrument crafted to produce specific pitches –is the oldest form of sound art, dating back to theancient Chinese lithophones (stones that are hit with amallet to produce vibrations). Its more modern pre-cedents include Marcel Duchamp’s 1916 Dadaist workA bruit secret (a ball of yarn with a mysterious objectinside that makes a sound when shaken), Russolo’s Artof Noises manifesto of 1913 (which advocates listeningto the sounds of car engines and trains as opposed tomusic) and John Cage’s First Construction in Metal(1939), which used anvils as part of its score. Its fore-most mid twentieth-century practitioners – HarryBertoia, Francois and Bernard Baschet, and JeanTinguely – came from different backgrounds (Bertoia afurniture and jewellery designer, Francois Baschet asculptor, Bernard Baschet a sound engineer, and Tin-guely a kinetic sculptor), but each emphasised sonorityas a physical property. Bertoia crafted long metal rodsthat sway and collide to create bell-like tones andmetallic drones; the Baschets also used rods, abettedby inflated balloons, cones or sheets of metal toamplify the sounds, which sounded uncannily electro-nic, despite being produced acoustically; Tinguely usedwheels, motors, cans, glasses to create a variety ofmachines, which he often invited the public to activate.

The latency of sound in sound sculpture is a qualityshared with other works of sound art. ConsiderKubisch’s aforementioned electrical walks, the Japa-nese art collective WrK’s Phase Difference BetweenTwo Windows by Using Line Vibrations (2001), inwhich the vibrations of two windows in a galleryspace are amplified to the point of audibility bycontact mics, or Alvin Lucier’s declaration that ‘Everyroom has its melody hiding there until it is madeaudible’ (Lucier 1990: 196) (as demonstrated in I AmSitting in a Room). So, sound art is concerned withexamining not only all apparent sounds of the envir-onment, but all unapparent sounds as well. JohnCage’s famous anoechic chamber experiment, in whichhe discovered that even in a supposedly sound-freeenvironment he could still hear the sounds of his owncirculatory system, confirmed the inescapability ofsound and is the cornerstone of these later experi-ments. It also confirms the association of sound withbeing alive (and of silence with death); one of thepsychological underpinnings of seeking out the latencyof sound in objects (or in silence) would be that theobject was actually somehow alive – and that if it wasalive it was in some sense a companion.

Sound Art 7

Related to the ideas of both teasing unseen soundor acoustic phenomena out of a space and importingor exporting sounds from elsewhere is that of sur-veillance, which is a facet of certain sound art works.Brandon LaBelle’s Learning from Seedbed (2003)revisits Vito Acconci’s infamous performance piecewhere he continually masturbated and vocalised hissexual fantasies, hidden from view under a ramp in agallery. LaBelle placed contact mics on a ramp tocreate a steady feedback hum that could be modu-lated by movement on the ramp but also to transmitvisitors’ movements and comments into anothergallery space. Janek Schaefer’s piece RecordedDelivery (1995) followed the first 72 minutes of apackage’s journey through the postal service, via asound-activated Dictaphone machine enclosed in thepackage (Bernhard Gal’s Soundbagism (2004) recor-ded the journey of a checked bag through an airportin a similar fashion). Scanner (aka Robin Rimbaud)did numerous recordings and performances pickingup people’s cell phone conversations using a scanner,which he would mix in with electronic music. In theseinstances sound is used to raise social issues of whatis private and what is public, but these works alsoraise the question of whether sounds themselves havea right to privacy – whether all sounds are meant tobe heard.

8. RELATED AREAS: SOUND DESIGN,

SOUND ECOLOGY

Sound design is another offshoot of the electronictechnologies of sound amplification and reproduc-tion. Certainly the sound effects of radio, in parti-cular for radio plays, are an early example of sounddesign; Orson Welles used his background in radio togreat effect in the soundtrack to Citizen Kane (1939),but sound design in film was slow to develop overall.While surround sound had been experimented with inthe mid-1950s, it wasn’t until the late 1970s, with theintroduction of the Dolby system, that film theatresapproached high-fidelity sound. Walter Murch becamethe first person to be credited as a sound designer (asopposed to a sound editor) on a film, for FrancisFord Coppola’s The Conversation (1974), because ofunion regulations. His work on Coppola’s The God-father (1972) used sounds instead of the customaryincidental music to emphasise dramatic passages, andhis background in musique concrete proved instru-mental in his approach to working on the sound inthese and other films, layering sounds on tape toachieve unique effects.

Nowadays, everything from computers to thea-trical productions to cell phones to greeting cards aresound designed; this is a testament to the rise in theprimacy of sound brought about by the technologiesof sound reproduction, as well as to the perceived

anthropomorphic traits of sound alluded to above. Italso contributes to the overall interest in sound thathas led to the higher visibility of sound art since thelate 1990s. However, the increase in sounds aroundus has also led to more density in an already highlysaturated ambient soundscape. Sound ecology, amovement which roughly parallels the developmentof sound art temporally, addresses questions of noisepollution and urban vs. rural soundscapes. CanadianR. Murray Schafer has led the quest, founding theWorld Forum for Acoustic Ecology (formerly theWorld Soundscape Project) and writing a seminaltext, 1977s The Tuning of the World. Schafer andcompatriots such as Hildegard Westerkamp andBarry Truax made dozens of recordings of differentsoundscapes across the globe, coming to the conclu-sion that the noise of the modern world is often atodds with the environment, and urging that limits beset on ambient sound levels in industrialised societies.They also pioneered soundscape composition, avariant of musique concrete in which field recordingswere electronically processed to some degree butfundamentally left recognisable. Truax has noted thatsoundscape composition simulates a journey, ormotion, through a landscape; soundwalks by Wes-terkamp often include narration to make this explicit(artist Janet Cardiff has also done soundwalks,although with an emphasis on a fictional narrativethat the listener assumes a role in, rather than thesoundscape). The sense of a timeline in soundscapecompositions ultimately marks them, to my mind, asmusic rather than sound art.

Environmental soundscapes provide a key tosound art’s progression from music, particularly thecompositions of John Cage. While Cage encouragedlistening to all sounds (and silence) as music, he stillworked with prescribed scores, indeterminate thoughthey may be. There is no score to ambient sound in itsraw form, which, if placed in an ongoing exhibitionsetting, is the aural equivalent to the Duchampianreadymade that Cage drew inspiration from. Theparadox is that both environment and architectureprovide models for sound art works; architecture isof course a subset of environment, but architectureis created by mankind for mankind and other livingcreatures while much of the environment is naturallyformed. Sound and hearing are phenomena thatextend far beyond the human experience – all lifeforms may experience sound, and sound may evenexist in areas of the universe where there are no lifeforms – which leads to the egalitarian nature of soundart. The relationship between the creator of a soundart work and one who experiences it is one of listener-to-listener – a relationship Cage himself establishedwith his groundbreaking ‘silent piece’, 403300 – not thetraditionally hierarchical relationship of composer orperformer to layman.

8 Alan Licht

9. IS IT SOUND ART?

Two recent works – a 2008 installation by artist andmusician David Byrne and a presentation byD.A.M.A.G.E. (Misha Mross and David Brown) atthe 2007 Cornell University Sound Art Forum – areexemplary of the ambiguities of present-day soundart. Byrne’s Playing the Building was installed in thedisused waiting room of a ferry terminal in lowerManhattan. Visitors were encouraged to play a small,weathered organ, which was hooked up to pipes,plumbing, beams, and other built-in metalworks vialong cables. When keys were pressed, the surfaceswould be struck to produce clanking sounds, whis-tling flute sounds, and low rumbles from motorspressed against girders. The room became a giantsound sculpture, with the organ acting as a kind ofsampling keyboard. However, because the onus wason the visitor to produce the sounds, in a way thepiece was more about non-musicians making musicthan it was about the sounds themselves. Thatthe piece was titled ‘playing the building’ and not‘listening to the building’ is telling. The relationshipof Byrne to the installation’s visitors is that of player-to-player, not listener-to-listener. While the soundswere spatialised, it was more for effect than toarticulate or outline the acoustic space. The use of theorgan, both as a controller and as a signifier, madethe installation part sound sculpture, part impromptumusic concert.D.A.M.A.G.E. devised a large plastic beach ball as

a controller for a custom sequencer/synthesiser. Theball is passed along to the audience, and as it isbounced around a variety of permutations of a fixednumber of tones are generated. Sonically, the result iselectronic music, programmed but still leaving acertain element to chance. Yet it is also interactive –there is no ‘music’ per se unless the audience keepsthe ball going, and the music stops if the ball becomesinactive. What once might have been simply regardedas a novelty type of experimental music performancemust now be reckoned with in light of the propertiesof sound art, as the ideas of latency and disdain fortraditional performance are at play here. We are nowin an era in which the exploration of sound bymusicians, artists, sound artists, designers and engi-neers often falls in between categories such as musicor sound art.

10. CONCLUSION

As a term, ‘sound art’ is mainly of value in creditingsite or object-specific works that are not intended asmusic per se. Much like rock and roll, a purist view ofsound art becomes very narrow, and much of what iscalled or categorised as sound art can be just as easilyviewed as a hyphenated fusion of sound art with an

experimental musical style. As sound artist SteveRoden wrote to me in late 2007, ‘sound is not amedium that developed through a clean linear trajec-tory and ended as a real movement like Futurismor even Fluxus y it’s a messy history that includes alot of wonderful things. Development for most of uswas piecemeal and personal, not as a group evolvingtogether.’ A universal definition and definitive historyof sound art may not be likely, for these reasons; butultimately it is better to honour sound pieces created ina non-time-based, non-programmatic way as beingsound art as opposed to music than to simply shoe-horn any sound work into the genre of experimentalmusic, or to practise the lazy revisionism of blanketingany experimental sound composition, performance orrecording under the rubric of sound art.

REFERENCES

Adams, Sam. 1997. Sounds on the Fringe. PhiladelphiaCity Paper, 28 August–4 September. http://www.citypaper.

net/articles/082897/article006.shtmlConrads, Ulrich. 1985. Acoustic Space: A Conversation

Between Bernhard Leitner and Ulrich Conrads. DAI-

DLOS 17, September. http://www.bernhardleitner.at/enCox, Christoph and Warner, David (eds.). 2004. Audio

Culture: Readings in Modern Music. New York: Con-tinuum Publishing.

Durner, Leah. 1989. Maryanne Amacher: Architect ofAural Design. EAR, February: 28–34.

Eno, Brian. 1978. Ambient Music. Liner notes to Ambient

#1: Music for airports. Editions EG.Eno, Brian. 1996. Ambient Music. In A Year with Swollen

Appendices. London: Faber & Faber.

Freire, Sergio. 2003. Early Musical Impressions from BothSides of the Loudspeaker. Leonardo Music Journal 13.

Kubisch, Christina. 2007. Invisble/Inaudible: Five ElectricalWalks. Newburyville, MA: Important Records.

Lucier, Alvin. 1990. Alvin Lucier in Conversation withDouglas Simon. In Dan Lander and Micah Lexier (eds.)Sound by Artists. Toronto, ON: Metropole and Walter

Phillips Gallery.Neuhaus, Max. 2000. Sound Art? Introduction to the

exhibition Volume: Bed of Sound PS 1 Contemporary

Art Center, New York, July. http://www.max-neuhaus.info/bibliography

Roden, Steve. 2007. Email correspondence with the author,

7 December.Schulz, Bernd (ed.). 2002. Resonanzen: Aspekte der Klang-

kunst (Resonances: Aspects of Sound Art). Heidelberg:Kehrer Verlag.

Toop, David. 2000. Sonic Boom, in Sonic Boom exhibitioncatalogue. London: Hayward Gallery Publishing,107–31.

Viola, Bill. 1990. The Sound of One Line Scanning. InDan Lander and Micah Lexier (eds.) Sound by Artists.Toronto: Art Metropole & Walter Philips Gallery,

39–54.Vitiello, Stephen. 2007. Listening to Donald Judd (audio

CD). Brussels: Sub Rosa.

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FURTHER REFERENCES

Kahn, Douglas. 1999. Noise, Water, Meat: History ofSound in the Arts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Khazam, Rahma. 2005. Cross-Platform: Rolf Julius. The

WIRE, November 82–3.

Licht, Alan. 2007. Sound Art: Beyond Music, BetweenCategories. New York: Rizzoli.

Ondaajte, Michael. 2004. The Conversations: WalterMurch and the Art of Editing Film. New York: Alfred A.Knopf.

10 Alan Licht

Sound Art and the Sonic Unconscious

CHRISTOPH COX

School of Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies, Hampshire College, Amherst, MA 01002, USAE-mail: ccox@hampshire.edu

This essay develops an ontology of sound and argues that

sound art plays a crucial role in revealing this ontology. I

argue for a conception of sound as a continuous, anonymous

flux to which human expressions contribute but which

precedes and exceeds these expressions. Developing Gottfried

Wilhelm Leibniz’s conception of the perceptual unconscious, I

propose that this sonic flux is composed of two dimensions: a

virtual dimension that I term ‘noise’ and an actual dimension

that consists of contractions of this virtual continuum: for

example, music and speech. Examining work by Max

Neuhaus, Chris Kubick, Francisco Lopez and others, I

suggest that the richest works of sound art help to disclose the

virtual dimension of sound and its process of actualisation.

As both a term and a practice, ‘sound art’ has becomeincreasingly prominent since the late 1990s. The labelhas been embraced by artists, curators and critics,and the number of museum and gallery exhibitsdedicated to (or prominently featuring) sound art hasgrown exponentially in recent years. While showcas-ing a new generation of audio artists, many of theseexhibitions have also traced a genealogy of sound artthat stretches back to the emergence of the art formin the 1960s and have thus given the current boom anhistorical footing.1

In 2001, sound installation pioneer Max Neuhausresponded to this situation by questioning the natureand viability of the practice. So-called ‘sound art’, hewrote, is nothing but an ‘art fad’. As a term and acategory, he maintained, it does no useful work anddoes not helpfully supplement existing categoriessuch as music or sculpture (Neuhaus 2000). Neuhaus’response captures a set of prevalent misgivings about‘sound art’, in particular the suspicion that the cate-gory is merely a way to repackage music for an artmarket and art-critical discourse that value visualobjects more than they value ephemeral sounds andrecordings of them. It also resonates with the view ofmany contemporary artists that ‘sound’ is not the

basis for an art form but is simply one tool in thecontemporary artist’s increasingly multi- (or post-)media toolkit (Cox 2004).

Neuhaus is a venerable figure whose engagementwith sound is both broad and deep. Nevertheless,I want to defend the distinction between ‘music’ and‘sound art’ – not in the interest of drawing up a tableof inclusion and exclusion, but in order to exploresome important philosophical distinctions betweenthese two fields of sonic art. The distinction, I con-tend, is an ontological one, a distinction between twodifferent domains of auditory existence. At its best,‘sound art’ opens up or calls attention to an auditoryunconscious, a transcendental or virtual domain ofsound that has steadily come to prominence over thecourse of the twentieth century.2 In contrast withmusic, speech and signal, I will call this domain noise,though we will see that the reach of this term extendsfar beyond that of its ordinary usage.

1. NOISE

Background noise [le bruit de fond] is the ground of ourperception, absolutely uninterrupted, it is our perennial

sustenance, the element of the software of all our logic.It is the residue and cesspool of our messages [y] It is tothe logos what matter used to be to form. Noise is thebackground of information, the material of that form

[y .] Background noise may well be the ground of ourbeing. It may be that our being is not at rest [y .] Thebackground noise never ceases; it is limitless, con-

tinuous, unending, unchanging. It has itself no back-ground, no contradictory [y .] Noise cannot be made aphenomenon; every phenomenon is separated from it, a

silhouette on a backdrop, like a beacon against the fog,as every message, every cry, every call, every signal must

1For example: Sonic Boom, Hayward Gallery, London, April–June2000; Volume: Bed of Sound, P.S. 1, New York City, July–September 2000; S.O.S.: Scenes of Sounds, Tang Museum of Art,October 2000–January 2001; Sounding Spaces: Nine Sound Instal-lations, NTT InterCommunication Center, Tokyo, July–September2003; Treble, Sculpture Center, New York City, May–July 2004;Sonambiente 2006, Akademie der Kunste, Berlin, 1 June–17 July2006; and Waves, Latvian National Museum of Art, Riga, 25August–17 September 2006.

2I use the term ‘transcendental’ in its philosophical sense, oneestablished by Immanuel Kant, who distinguished between the‘empirical’, ‘the transcendental’ and the ‘transcendent’. In keepingwith traditional metaphysics, Kant uses the term ‘empirical’ to referto the domain of (ordinary and scientific) sensory experience andthe term ‘transcendent’ to what lies entirely outside of thisexperience. The novelty of Kant’s epistemology is to carve out athird domain, ‘the transcendental’, which designates the conditionsfor the possibility of experience, conditions that are not discovereddirectly within experience but without which experience as weknow it would not be possible. In this essay, I draw on GillesDeleuze’s reformulation of the Kantian transcendental as provid-ing the genetic conditions for real experience rather than the generalconditions for all possible experience.

Organised Sound 14(1): 19–26 & 2009 Cambridge University Press. Printed in the United Kingdom. doi:10.1017/S1355771809000041

be separated from the hubbub that occupies silence,in order to be, to be perceived, to be known, to be

exchanged. As soon as a phenomenon appears, it leavesthe noise; as soon as a form looms up or pokes through,it reveals itself by veiling noise. So noise is not a matter

of phenomenology, so it is a matter of being itself.(Serres 1982: 7, 13)

We tend to think of ‘noise’ as a secondary phenom-enon, as something derivative. Noise is disruptive. Itdisturbs or interrupts an initial state of calm. It inter-feres with communication and thought, making itdifficult to hear, speak, understand or concentrate. Inany case, noise is a nuisance that we wish to eliminateand that we believe can be eliminated. The discourseof information theory lends scientific support to thiseveryday position, taking noise to be what interfereswith the transmission of messages and signals. For theinformation theorist, noise is the muck that accumu-lates on or around a message as it makes its way fromsender to receiver. As a practical science, informationtheory takes as its aim the elimination or suppressionof such detritus and a restoration of the message orsignal in all its original purity.

The opposition between signal and noise (or musicand noise) would thus seem to conform to the tradi-tional metaphysical oppositions between substance andaccident, essence and appearance. Yet from Hume andNietzsche through Quine and Derrida, such oppositionshave come under serious philosophical attack. Like-wise, a rigorous philosophical consideration of soundshould want to deconstruct the distinction betweensignal and noise. One way of doing so is to show thatthe distinction is relative rather than absolute. Hence,the composer Edgard Varese, for example, asserts thatit is simply matter of perspective: ‘Subjectively,’ hequips, ‘noise is any sound one doesn’t like’ (Varese1962: 20). Cultural theorist Abraham Moles concursby way of a telling example. He notes that – thoughcertainly musical – an orchestra tuning up is generallyconsidered to be noise, while the clapping of an audi-ence – a form of ‘white noise’ – is taken to be mean-ingful and, hence, signal. ‘In short,’ Moles concludes,‘there is no absolute structural difference between noiseand signal. They are of the same nature. The onlydifference which can be logically established betweenthem is based exclusively on the concept of intent onthe part of the transmitter. A noise is a signal that thesender does not want to transmit’ (Moles 1966: 78).

This sort of relativity would seem to put signal andnoise on a par with one another, allowing noise anontological place of its own, one no longer sub-ordinate to signal. Yet this relativism, too, privilegessignal. It construes the distinction between signal andnoise (or music and noise) solely from the perspectiveof communication and meaning, and of humanintentions and values. And yet, before there werecreatures to exchange signals, there was a generalised

noise: the crackling of cosmic radiation, the rush ofthe wind, the roar of the sea. And, even now, everysignal is issued against the backdrop of this noise. AsSerres puts it, ‘noise’ is the background hubbub oflife, the ceaseless sonic flux. Just as objects fill visualspace, noise is what fills the auditory field: the hum offluorescent lights, the rustling of leaves or fabric, thesound of traffic, radio static – indeed, all of thesecombined. It is from this background that any signalcomes to the fore, temporarily drawing our attentionto it and away from the background noise.

In this sense, ‘noise’ is not an empirical phenom-enon, not simply one sound among many. Rather, itis a transcendental phenomenon, the condition ofpossibility for signal and music. To get at thistranscendental dimension, I want to turn to the greatearly modern philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz,who, two centuries before Freud, presented a pow-erful theory of the unconscious that has particularrelevance to auditory experience.3

2. LEIBNIZ AND THE AUDITORY

UNCONSCIOUS

Leibniz is often grouped with Rene Descartes as aEuropean rationalist. But the two developed sig-nificantly different theories of knowledge, mind andmetaphysics. For Descartes, the mind is completelytransparent to itself, and all thought is consciousthought. Clear and distinct ideas serve as the stan-dard for truth and epistemic certainty, and Descartesinsists that clear ideas are necessarily distinct, andvice versa. Leibniz objects that clear ideas alwayshave an element of confusion or indistinctness aboutthem and that conscious thought makes up only asmall portion of mental content. To illustrate thisclaim, he routinely offers the example of a man wholives near a mill or a waterfall. Such a man, he notes,no longer distinctly hears the sounds made by the millor waterfall even though they are ever-present. NowLeibniz maintains that such a person does, in fact,register these sounds, but only unconsciously, asbackground, as something ordinary and not singular.And this is true of so-called ‘white noise’ generally,Leibniz’s favourite example of which is the sound ofthe sea. He writes:

Each soul knows the infinite – knows all – but con-

fusedly. It is like walking on the seashore and hearingthe great noise of the sea: I hear the particular noises ofeach wave, of which the whole noise is composed, butwithout distinguishing them. But confused perceptions

are the result of impressions that the whole universe

3Leibniz’s differential theory of the unconscious has been revivedby Gilles Deleuze, who finds in it a compelling alternative toFreud’s conflictual model. See, for example, Deleuze (1968: 107–8;1980b).

20 Christoph Cox

makes upon us; it is the same for each monad (Leibniz1989: 211).4

When I walk along the seashore, my perception of‘the great noise of the sea’ is clear; that is, it is fullyand powerfully audible. But it is also confused, sinceI hear this sound as a mass and don’t distinguish itselements – the individual waves – which remainobscure. Yet I must in some sense hear the individualwaves, otherwise I could not hear the aggregate.Hence the sound of each individual wave must bedistinct for me, though in an unconscious and, hence,obscure sense. What is clear, then, is also confused,and what is distinct is also obscure.The sounds of the mill, waterfall and sea are cited

by Leibniz as evidence for his theory of ‘minuteperceptions’ (petites perceptions). According to thistheory, each of our conscious perceptions is groundedin a vast swarm of elements that do not reachconscious thought.5 Such unconscious perceptionshave what Leibniz calls a virtual existence.6 Theydetermine conscious perception but are not presentto it. Leibniz notes that memory, too, has such avirtual existence. Our present experience takes placeagainst the backdrop of a vast reservoir of memory,which, for the most part, remains unconscious.Yet a photograph, a song or a chance encountercan draw a portion of this reservoir into actuality,temporarily illuminating it and offering a glimpse ofthe totality.7

This virtual field has, for Leibniz, a truly cosmicsignificance. Each of the ‘minute perceptions’ thatunconsciously determine conscious perception is itselfthe effect of causes that ramify out to infinity. Eachindividual wave is the result of a multitude of forces: thespeed and direction of the wind, air pressure and tem-perature, the temperature and viscosity of the water,and so on. As a result, each conscious perception is thelocal registration of the entire state of the universe atany given moment. And the same is true of memory.The reservoir of memory contains not only particularmemories or experiences – traces of all the past eventsI have experienced – but everything to which thoseexperiences and memories are connected – namely,

the entirety of the past.8 This is not an extravagantidea if we acknowledge that, evolutionarily speaking,I am my entire past – not only my personal past butthe past of my entire species and, indeed, of naturalhistory in general. Such forces or tendencies are in meor are contained in memory in a virtual state, anobscure state of indistinction, latency and dilation.When we manifest a particular tendency or rememberan event or experience, we draw it from this reservoir,actualising it or contracting it. Hence, in the passagecited above, Leibniz can conclude that each indivi-dual (each ‘monad’) ‘knows the infinite’, ‘knows all’,albeit ‘confusedly’ – that is, virtually.

So, too, what we call ‘white noise’ contains, inprinciple, all frequencies of sonic energy in a sort ofdilated state such that no one element comes to thefore or draws our attention. In his book Sound Ideas,Aden Evens reminds us that

Vibrations do not disappear, but dissipate, echoing allthe while, for energy is conserved. Every vibration, everysound, hangs in the air, in the room, in bodies. Sounds

spread out, they become less and less contracted, theyfuse, but they still remain, their energy of vibrationmoving the air and the walls in the room, making a noise

that still tickles the strings of a violin playing weekslater. Every sound masks an entire history of sound, acacophony of silence (2005: 14).

If we accept Leibniz’s argument, we hear each ofthese sound waves – past and present – but we hearthem confusedly. Indeed, like the man who lives neara watermill, this sound remains background to us andconstitutes what we call ‘silence’. Only the singularityof a signal – speech or music, for example – standsout against this background, contracts it, and renderssound clear and noticeable.

We saw that, for Leibniz, each individual ‘knows[and hears] the infinite – knows [and hears] all – butconfusedly’. He goes on to imagine God as one whoknows and hears the totality. In the passage quotedabove, Leibniz writes that ‘confused perceptions arethe result of impressions that the whole universemakes upon us [y .] God alone has distinct knowl-edge of the whole’.9 This theological posit may seemoutmoded, but, in his recent book on noise, electricalengineer Bart Kosko offers a strikingly similar con-clusion. ‘Is the universe noise?’ Kosko asks, and thencontinues:

That question is not as strange as it sounds. Noise is anunwanted signal. A signal is anything that conveysinformation or ultimately anything that has energy. The

universe consists of a great deal of energy. Indeed aworking definition of the universe is all energy anywhere

4This example (and the associated examples of the mill andwaterfall) are recurrent in Leibniz’s corpus. They appear in theDiscourse on Metaphysics, the letters to Arnauld, the New Essayson Human Understanding, and elsewhere.5This theory receives its fullest elaboration in Leibniz (1704: 53ff,115ff). ‘Apperception’ is Leibniz’s technical term for consciousperception, while unconscious perceptions are generally termed‘perceptions’ or ‘minute perceptions’.6What Remnant and Bennett translate as ‘potentialities’ and‘potential’ are, in Leibniz’s French, virtualite and virtuel, respec-tively.7Henri Bergson explores this issue in great detail And, indeed, it isfrom Bergson that Gilles Deleuze derives his distinction betweenthe virtual and the actual. Yet we see that this distinction can betraced back further to Leibniz.

8See, for example, Leibniz (1704: 54–5, 113) and Discourseon Metaphysics, y8–9, Principles of Nature and Grace y13, andMonadology y61, in Leibniz (1989).9See also Discourse on Metaphysics, yy8–9 in Leibniz (1989).

Sound Art and the Sonic Unconscious 21

ever [y .] [T]he noise-signal duality lets a sincere pan-theist counter that he loves or wants God and that God

just is the entire universe but spelled with fewer letters.So to him the universe is not noise but one big wantedsignal. (Kosko 2006: 65)

Kosko and Leibniz thus seem to figure the dis-tinction between signal and noise as an epistemolo-gical limitation. What we human beings hear as noise(as confused perception) would be perceived by asuperior intellect as a clear signal. For God, there areno confused ideas, no noise. As such, Leibniz andKosko fall back on the idea that the distinctionbetween noise and signal is merely a matter of per-spective and that noise is ultimately a secondary,superfluous phenomenon, the result of a deficiency.

Yet Leibniz’s theory of ‘minute perceptions’ sug-gests an alternative understanding that dispenseswith the theological posit.10 Instead of construingthe relationship of signal to noise as a horizontaldistinction between part and whole (I clearly graspthis small zone or segment, but the vast whole escapesme), this theory construes the relationship as a ver-tical distinction between conscious perception and anauditory unconscious. The sound of the sea, we saw,is derived from an infinity of small perceptions (thesound of all the individual waves), which we uncon-sciously register but do not consciously perceive.What we do consciously perceive is the differentialresult of these minute perceptions that manifests itselfas the ocean’s roar. Leibniz’s other prominent audi-tory example approaches this idea from the otherside. For the man who lives next to the watermill, itis not the parts but the entire sound that is – or hasbecome – imperceptible. This sound has ceased to beremarkable and has become ordinary, unconscious,background. Leibniz thus makes it possible for us tograsp the distinction between signal and noise not asone between part and whole, ignorance and knowledgebut as one between the singular and the ordinary,perception and its conditions of genesis, the actual andthe virtual.

According to this reading, noise is not some linearaccumulation of signals (which would still subordinatethe former to the latter). Rather, noise is the set ofsonic forces that are capable of entering into differ-ential relations with one another in such a way thatthey surpass the threshold of audibility and becomesignal. Noise and signal, then, are not differences indegree or number but differences in kind, distinctdomains. Noise is no longer merely one sound amongmany, a sound that we do not want to hear or cannothear. Rather, it is the ceaseless and intense flow ofsonic matter that is actualised in, but not exhausted by,speech, music and significant sound of all sorts. Indeed,

in a lecture on Leibniz, Gilles Deleuze offers just sucha suggestion. ‘One can [y] conceive of a continuousacoustic flow [y] that traverses the world and thateven encompasses silence’, he writes. ‘A musician issomeone who appropriates something from this flow’(1980a: 78). This is the idea I want to pursue here: noiseas the ground, the condition of possibility for everysignificant sound, as that from which all speech, musicand signal emerges and to which it returns.

3. SOUND ART AND THE VIRTUAL

If ‘music’ actualises this sonic flux, what then is therole of sound art? I suggested at the outset that soundart turns an ear towards the transcendental or virtualdimension of sound that Leibniz has helped us tograsp. While this domain remains generally uncon-scious and inaudible, Leibniz notes that certainbodily and mental states – illness, dizziness, swoon-ing, head injury, dreamless sleep, and so on – allowan influx of ‘minute perceptions’ and an opening ontothis virtual dimension.11 Leibniz has little to sayabout art, but it is clear that aesthetic forms can alsooffer access to this dimension insofar as they suspendour ordinary sensori-motor habits and the aim ofpractical communication in favour of an explorationof the very stuff of perception and sensation. Suchan aesthetic extension of Leibniz is proposed byFriedrich Nietzsche who, in The Birth of Tragedy,attempts to show that the formal organisation of musicis grounded in a chaotic flux of sonic forces, drivesand energies that he termed ‘Dionysian’.12 Soundart, I suggest, opens up just this virtual dimension ofthe sonic.

Leibniz traced the auditory unconscious throughordinary experience. Yet sound recording amplifiedit and brought it to the fore. In his Gramophone, Film,Typewriter, Friedrich Kittler nicely captures the signif-icance of Edison’s and Cros’s invention of the phono-graph in 1877, a watershed event in the history ofsound. ‘The phonograph’, Kittler writes, ‘does not hearas do ears that have been trained immediately to filtervoices, words, and sounds out of noise; it registersacoustic events as such. Articulateness becomes a sec-ond-order exception in a spectrum of noise’ (Kittler1986: 23). Edison wished to capture the human voice inspeech and song; yet he could not help but also capturethe reverberations of the room, the hum of electricity,the whir of the machine, and countless incidentalsounds that make up the auditory field. For the

10On the two interpretations of Leibniz’s theory of perception, seeDeleuze (1968: 213–14; 1988: 87ff; 1980b).

11See Leibniz (1704: 113; 1989: 215–16).12For a reading of The Birth of Tragedy along these lines, see Cox(2005). In a brief remark, Deleuze suggests this rich connectionbetween Leibniz and Nietzsche: ‘Leibniz very nearly encounteredDionysus at the sea shore or near the water mill. Perhaps Apollo,the clear-confused thinker, is needed in order to think the Ideas ofDionysus’ (1968: 214).

22 Christoph Cox

phonograph is an indiscriminate register, and itsmachinic contraction is markedly non-human. As acultural device, the phonograph performs a sort oftrompe l’oreille. It draws the ear to attention but, insteadof delivering articulate sound, it transmits ‘acousticevents as such’, the ‘spectrum of noise’. For more than acentury now, audio engineers have attempted to elim-inate or reduce this field of noise, which, however,sound artists embrace as their very material.Seventy years after the invention of the phono-

graph, Pierre Schaeffer exploited this potential ofrecording devices (initially phonographs and, later,tape recorders) to produce a set of ‘noise studies’ thatsubstituted worldly sound for the rarefied realm ofmusical tones, musical instruments, musicians, con-ductors and concert-going audiences. A radio engi-neer rather than a composer or musician, Schaefferwas attuned to the virtual domain of sound – itstransmission of an invisible and inaudible field ofwaves to be contracted or actualised by radio recei-vers and amplifiers at singular points within thebroadcast range. The phonograph and tape recorderfurther deterritorialised sound, detaching it from anydeterminate time and place and giving it a floatingexistence. Moreover, to Schaeffer’s delight, phono-graphy withdrew sound from its visual source andfield of reference, calling attention to its abstractsonic substance and autonomous fluid existence(Schaeffer 1966). Indeed, in its very name and in itsoperation, Schaeffer’s musique concrete took upresidence at the borderline between the virtual andthe actual, amplifying the process of actualisationwhereby worldly sound and background noise areconscripted into the domain of music.A decade prior to Schaeffer’s experiments, John

Cage was calling for a shift from music to back-ground noise. ‘Wherever we are, what we hear ismostly noise’, he wrote in 1937. ‘When we ignore it, itdisturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fasci-nating. The sound of a truck at fifty miles per hour.Static between the stations. Rain. We want to captureand control these sounds, to use them not as soundeffects but as musical instruments’ (Cage 1937: 25–6).Cage remained fascinated with noise but eventuallylost interest in controlling it or making music with it.His justly famous 1952 composition 403300 simplyoffers an auditory opening onto background noise,drawing attention to the sonic field ignored or sup-pressed by everyday hearing. Like Luigi Russolobefore him, Cage’s attunement to noise was facili-tated by the machinery of modern life, particularly bythe ‘oscillators, turntables, generators, means foramplifying small sounds, film phonographs, etc.’celebrated in his 1937 credo. Its non-technologicalsimplicity notwithstanding, 403300 owes its inspirationto technologies of sound reproduction and trans-mission. Under the title Silent Prayer, it was initially

conceived in 1948 as a submission to the MuzakCorporation.13 And it immediately followed thecomposition of Imaginary Landscape #4, scored fortwelve radios. For Cage, the radio was a tool ofindeterminacy, since the composer and performershad to submit themselves to whatever happened to bebroadcast at the time. And, of course, radio is aperfect model for acoustic flow: it is always there, aperpetual transmission; but we tap into it only peri-odically. Indeed, 403300 functions like a sort of radio.For a brief window in time, it attunes us to the infi-nite and continuously unfolding domain of worldlysound. As Cage once put it: ‘Music is continuous;only listening is intermittent’ (1982: 224).

Against the conventional conception of ‘noise’ asloud and disruptive, Cage equated ‘noise’ with‘silence’; by the same token, he rejected the conven-tional conception of ‘silence’ as the absence ofsound.14 For Cage, ‘noise’ meant precisely what Ihave been calling ‘background noise’, the intensivemurmur that fills every silence or, rather, that ofwhich so-called ‘silence’ is made. Indeed, Cage’sconception of ‘silence’ (and, by the same token,‘noise’) is double. In one sense, he takes ‘silence’ to bea sound – namely, ‘background noise’ in the con-ventional sense. In this sense, Cage asks us to shiftour auditory focus from foreground to background,from one field of sounds to another. In another sense,he takes ‘silence’ to be something inaudible – namely,the transcendental dimension of sound: the perpetualsonic flux of the world that is the condition of pos-sibility for the audibility of any sound. Cage thusrecapitulates Leibniz’s sonic figures. Silence is thesound of the mill or waterfall, the perceptual back-ground that we no longer hear. But it is also thesound of the seashore, whose roar registers theinaudible intensive forces that produce it, a noumenalessence that we grasp without distinctly hearing it.15

Cage’s 403300 offers us an aural opening onto a regionof this sound, which we perceive more or less clearly –the shuffling of feet, wind and rain, the muttering ofthe audience – but this experience also draws ourattention to what remains out of earshot: the globalfield and flow of noise, which we perceive onlyobscurely.

13‘[I have a desire] to compose a piece of uninterrupted silence andsell it to the Muzak Co. It will be 3 or 412 minutes long – those beingthe standard lengths of ‘‘canned’’ music, and its title will be SilentPrayer. It will open with a single idea which I will attempt to makeas seductive as the color and shape and fragrance of a flower. Theending will approach imperceptibility’ (Cage 1948: 43).14‘There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time.There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try aswe may to make a silence, we cannot’ (Cage 1957: 8).15I use ‘noumenal’ here not in the Kantian sense of that which isinaccessible to experience but in the Deleuzian sense of the inten-sive, differential forces that produce empirical entities. See, forexample, Deleuze (1968: 222).

Sound Art and the Sonic Unconscious 23

This situation is characteristic of sound art ingeneral, which tends to focus on the conditions ofpossibility of audition and the noisy substrate ofsignificant sound. In Max Neuhaus’ seminal instal-lation Times Square (1977–92, 2002–), for example, aset of rich metallic drones emanate from deep inside asubway vent, blending with and subtly altering thedin of New York City’s busiest district. Withoutexplicitly drawing attention to themselves, they definean indefinite region of aesthetic consideration thatextends beyond them to the city as a whole. Broad-cast 24 hours a day, they allude to the general sonicflux of the world. The same can be said for manyother sound art projects, for example ChristinaKubisch’s Electrical Walks (2003–), which employpurpose-built headphones to make audible regions ofthe electromagnetic flux in which we are constantlybathed.

A spate of recent projects investigate what soundtechnicians call ‘room tone’, the low-level sonicmurmur generated by the minute movements of airparticles in enclosed spaces. Filmmakers record roomtone to establish the soundtrack’s foundation, asubconscious sonic field without which dialogue anddiegetic sound would seem artificial and unmoored.Film practice, then, provides a technical acknowl-edgment of background noise as the necessary con-dition for significant sound. Recent sound art hasforegrounded this background. Chris Kubick andAnne Walsh’s Room Tone (2007) catalogues hun-dreds of room-tone recordings, which are selected,fragmented and combined by a generative audioprogram and sent through a four-channel speakersystem that emits an ever-shifting collage of ‘silence’in its infinite variety. The differential juxtaposition ofthese recordings makes audible their unique char-acteristics, as do a series of text sketches that offera playful taxonomy (‘Off-Screen Room Tone’, ‘Neo-Platonic Room Tone: Abbey Church of St Denis,Fr.’; ‘Room Tone ‘‘La Vide’’ ’; ‘Silence, ConfessionBooth Tone’; ‘Bassy Fox Hole Rumble’, and so on).16

The uniqueness of each room’s ‘silence’ is thestarting point for Brandon LaBelle’s Room Tone (18Sounds in 6 Models) (2008). In Leibnizian fashion,this project takes room tone as a dense perceptualmultiplicity that, in principle, registers the complexmateriality of a given space: its dimensions, thematerials of its construction, the nature and place-ment of its contents, its geographical location, and soon. LaBelle made three different recordings of hisBerlin apartment and sent them to six architects, eachof whom were asked to use them as the sole basis

from which to construct a three-dimensional renderingof the space. Not surprisingly, the infinite complexityof the sound sources – manifested as a multitude ofminute perceptions – made their full explication apractical impossibility, resulting in architecturalmodels that diverge widely from one another.17

Andy Graydon’s Chora series (Chora in Three andChora for, both 2008) also works with the compleximplications and foldings that constitute ‘silence’.Both projects contrast the site and temporal specifi-city of room tone with the portability made possibleby recording and the modulating or complicatingeffect of the new spaces and times into which suchrecordings can be played back. Graydon began withrecordings of room tone that were then broadcast inthe same space at a later time (Chora in Three) or in adifferent space (Chora for). They thus produce sonicfolds of space and time that challenge audiencesto unfold them or to recognise the impossibility ofsuch a task.18

All these recent projects pay homage not only toCage but also to Alvin Lucier’s classic sound workI Am Sitting in a Room (1970), which, via sonic folding,explores the resonances between sound and archi-tectural enclosure. Lucier’s piece begins with a shorttext that reflexively describes the procedure of itsconstruction and outlines its aims:

I am sitting in a room different from the one you are innow. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice andI am going to play it back into the room again and again

until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforcethemselves so that any semblance of my speech, withperhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed. What youwill hear, then, are the natural resonant frequencies of

the room articulated by speech. I regard this activity notso much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but moreas a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech

might have.

Danish sound artist Jacob Kirkegaard’s FourRooms (2006) follows the same procedure but withdifferent aims. In each of four abandoned rooms inthe heart of Chernobyl’s ‘zone of exclusion’, the artistrecorded ten minutes of room tone. He then repeat-edly played back his initial recording and re-recordedit, effectively amplifying this room tone and high-lighting the room’s acoustic signature, which emergesas a complex drone composed of a cluster of unstableharmonics. Lucier’s piece moves from personal,human and domestic speech to pure anonymoussound; Kirkegaard’s project begins where Lucier’s

16Kubick and Walsh’s installation was presented in ‘On Being anExhibition’, Artists Space, New York, 12 October–7 December2007. For more on the project, see http://www.doublearchive.com/projects/room_tone

17LaBelle’s installation was exhibited at the Berlin branch of theStaalplaat Record Shop in July 2008. See http://www.errantbodies.org/Room_Tone_18sounds.html18The installation Chora for Three was shown in the groupexhibition ‘Displacement’ from 8 March to 30 March 2008 atGreenbelt, New York City. Chora for was presented at IssueProject Room, New York City, on 3 May 2008.

24 Christoph Cox

leaves off and aims, in a sense, to reverse the process.The depopulated rooms recorded by Kirkegaard areprofoundly overdetermined by the nuclear disasterthat, twenty years earlier, forced their sudden eva-cuation. Thus, the drones that emerge from theserooms are, presumably, inflected by the radioactiveparticles and electromagnetic waves that still invisiblymove within them. They are also haunted by thehuman beings that once inhabited them. Like sound,radiation doesn’t die but only dissipates, dilates, orloses energy. Kirkegaard’s recordings, then, can beseen as an effort to amplify or contract these dis-sipated or dilated sounds, to rescue sonic emissionsthat outlive those who produced them. They disclosethe immemorial background noise out of whichhuman sounds emerge and into which they recede;and they point toward an elemental time the half-lifeof which dwarfs human history.I will conclude with a final example that, like

Kirkegaard’s, foregrounds the temporality andintensity of background noise: Francisco Lopez’srecent CD Wind (Patagonia) (2007). On the face ofit, the CD’s content is simple and austere: an hour-long, unedited and unprocessed recording of windas it sweeps through the Argentine Patagonia. Yetthe recording is sensually complex and conceptuallyrevealing.19 It draws our attention to a host ofauditory phenomena that ordinary hearing ignores orrelegates to the background. Indeed, Lopez’s projectworks to disclose the very nature of sound, hearingand sound recording. The piece as a whole focuseson the very medium of sonic transport – air – andhighlights the fact that sound is simply the result ofpressure changes in that medium. Its subject matter –wind – is the most elemental of all phenomena and themost primeval sonic stuff. Wind is powerful, invisibleand ever-changing. To focus on it is to transcend thelimits of our ordinary ontology, composed as it is ofrelatively stable visible objects. For wind is purebecoming, pure flow. It is immemorial, but never thesame. And it is nothing but the play of differentialforces, differences in air pressure and temperaturethat generate immense currents, fronts and burstsacross the surface of the earth – phenomena that arecontracted by our ears (and by the microphonemembrane) as sound. Here again we hear not onlyempirical noise – background noise – but come closeto grasping its inaudible conditions of possibility, thedifferential forces from which sound and hearingspring. If, as I noted above, Schaeffer’s musique

concrete called attention to the process of actualisa-tion whereby background noise becomes music,Lopez’s Wind (Patagonia) reverses this movement,offering a sort of deactualisation or virtualisation ofsonic material (see Levy 1998).

Let me sum up by returning to my initial questionabout the relationship between sound art and music.For millennia, the art of sound has been identifiedwith music, or what the Greeks called musike, whichencompassed poetry and dance as well. If one acceptsthis identification, then ‘sound art’ is a superfluous,redundant and pretentious moniker. Yet, I have triedto show that, over the past century and a quarter, anew domain of sound has opened up and a newexperience of sound has emerged, a domain andexperience heard faintly by Leibniz and amplified byEdison and his heirs. Exploration of this domain hasmarked the entire history of sonic experimentation inthe twentieth century: from the intonorumori of Rus-solo and Varese’s ‘liberation of sound’ throughSchaeffer and Cage, the sound poetry of Henri Chopinand Francois Dufrene, Luc Ferrari’s ‘almost nothing’,Brian Eno’s ‘ambient music’ and beyond. Sound art, Ihave argued, turns fully toward this virtual dimensionof sound and makes it the subject of its inquiry. Assuch, it broadens the domain of the audible and dis-closes a genuine metaphysics of sound.

REFERENCES

Cage, J. 1937. Future of Music: Credo. In Cox and Warner(2004).

Cage, J. 1948. A Composer’s Confessions. In Richard

Kostelanetz (ed.) John Cage: Writer. New York: Lime-light Editions, 1993.

Cage, J. 1957. Experimental Music. Silence: Lectures andWritings. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University/University

Press of New England, 1961.Cage, J. 1982. Introduction. Themes & Variations. In Cox

and Warner (2004).

Cox, C. 2004. (ed.) Audio Files: Sound Art Now: AnOnline Symposium. http://artforum.com/symposium/id56682

Cox, C. 2005. Nietzsche, Dionysus, and the Ontology ofMusic. In Keith Ansell Pearson (ed.) A Companion toNietzsche. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Cox, C. and Warner D. 2004. (eds.) Audio Culture: Read-ings in Modern Music. New York: Continuum.

Deleuze, G. 1968. Difference and Repetition. Trans. PaulPatton. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.

Deleuze, G. 1980a. Vincennes Session of April 15, 1980,Leibniz Seminar. Trans. Charles J. Stivale. Discourse20(3) (Fall 1998).

Deleuze, G. 1980b. Seminar on Leibniz, April 29. http://www.webdeleuze.com/php/texte.php?cle555&groupe5

Leibniz&langue52

Deleuze, G. 1988. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Trans.Tom Conley. Minneapolis: University of MinnesotaPress, 1993.

19Of course any choice and framing of material is a form of editing,and the choice of microphones and recorders involves a degree ofprocessing. Through passages of audible distortion, Lopez makesus aware of these choices, while also highlighting the degree towhich they are involved in any form of listening. For to listen is toedit; and, fabricated by millenia of natural selection, ears, too, aremechanical devices that contract sound.

Sound Art and the Sonic Unconscious 25

Evens, A. 2005. Sound Ideas: Music, Machines, and Experience.Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Kirkegaard, J. 2006. Four Rooms. London: Touch, Tone 26.Kittler, F. 1986. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Trans.

Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz. Stanford,

CA: Stanford University Press, 1999.Kosko, B. 2006. Noise. New York: Viking.Leibniz, G.W. 1704. New Essays on Human Understanding.

Ed. and trans. Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennett.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

Leibniz, G.W. 1989. Philosophical Essays. Ed. and trans.Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber. Indianapolis, IN:

Hackett.Levy, Pierre. 1998. Becoming Virtual. Trans. Robert

Bononno. New York: Plenum.

Lopez, F. 2007. Wind (Patagonia). Seattle: and/OAR.Lucier, A. 1970. I Am Sitting in a Room. New York: Lovely

Music, LCD 1013, 1981.Moles, A. 1966. Information Theory and Esthetic Percep-

tion. Trans. Joel E. Coen. Urbana: University of Illinois

Press.Neuhaus, M. 2000. Sound Art? http://www.max-neuhaus.

info/soundworks/soundart

Schaeffer, P. 1966. Acousmatics. In Cox and Warner(2004).

Serres, M. 1982. Genesis. Trans. Genevieve James andJames Nielson. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan

Press, 1995.Varese, E. 1962. The Liberation of Sound. In Cox and

Warner (2004).

26 Christoph Cox

A Metamorphosis of the Muses: Referentialand contextual aspects in sound art*

LIL IAN CAMPESATO

Music Department, University of Sao Paulo, Sao Paulo, BrazilE-mail: lilicampesato@usp.br

This paper addresses some aspects related to the use of sound

to create referential and representational discourses in sound

art. We concentrate on the particular use of sound in this

repertoire whose delimitation is still increasing among

practitioners. As a relatively new art genre it oscillates

between aesthetical and organisational strategies that are

commonly found in the domain of both music and visual arts.

At the same time, it resists being fully incorporated by these

two domains as it develops a discourse that is very specific to

its own. To analyse these relations we focus on two

fundamental aspects for the study of sound art: space and

time. The sound art repertoire approaches these two aspects

in a very particular way, placing them at the core of its

creative process and establishing connections with conceptual

and referential aspects that are put in evidence by sound. We

will concentrate on two different points of view: on one side,

we analyse how sounds can build temporal discourses that

become attached to specific spaces; on the other side, we

consider the use of a space that emerges from contextual

connections triggered by sounds.

1. INTRODUCTION

1.1. Sound appropriation by sound art

Since the late 1970s, somewhere between visual artsand music, we have watched the rise of an art form thathas come to be referred to as sound art. Some of themain characteristics of this repertoire are its conceptionand use of sound, the absence of a narrative discourse,an approach that emphasises contextual aspects, theinteraction with the public, and the connection betweenbody, space and time. Sound art is highly connected toconventional musical practices as it uses sound as itsessential element. At the same time, it resonates withcontemporary practice in the visual arts since it makesuse of space and visual elements to project sound andcreate aural environments. Both music and visual artsare important to understand how sound art hasclaimed its own territory.Despite the direct connection between music and

visual arts, sound art established a new artistic practicethat can be understood as a result of sound’s impact on

the arts in the twentieth century. Sound’s role inestablishing representation and signification processesis a key element in the analysis of this repertoire. Tounderstand these processes we can start from thehypothesis that sound has followed two different pathswithin the arts. On the one hand, there is the musicalroute towards the creation of strategies and proceduresto establish a self-referential grammar. This processculminates with the emphasis on sound itself as asource and foundation of musical discourse, as one canfind in Pierre Schaeffer’s ecoute reduite (Schaeffer1966) or in John Cage’s transpositions of everydaysounds into music (Dyson 1992). On the other hand,we can observe, especially outside the musical domain,a tendency to explore the contextual and representa-tional potentiality of sound, which is the basis of whatconstitutes the repertoire of today’s sound art. In thefirst case the idea of musicalisation of sounds emerges(Kahn 1999); in the second, sound material is directlyconnected with other aspects of culture and life.

While instrumental and electroacoustic musiccomposition remained connected to an abstractaspiration, sound art, like the visual arts, tended tomake reference to objects, concepts or ideas. Herethere is a hybridisation of strategies that are presentin both music and visual arts. Sound art comes closerto musique concrete by exploring timbre and theperceptive qualities of diverse sound categories. Atthe same time it assumes a more flexible attitude inrelation to the abstraction of discourse created fromthe sound material. In the same way as can beobserved within visual arts, sound art widely exploresthe use of diverse elements (not only sounds, but alsoall sorts of objects, light, images, space, bodies) tocreate direct and complex relationships to what isoutside the work itself. In sound art, a concreteconception of sound is allied to a fragmented timeapproach and to the use of an aesthetically activespace, which corroborate in a syntax that is seldombased on musical abstract structures.

Thus the possibility of a closer and more directcontact with sound on a level less mediated by sym-bolic representations (as is the case of music notation)has raised a concrete, almost ‘material’ conception ofsound and a different relationship between the artist

*I acknowledge Fapesp (State of Sao Paulo Research Foundation,Brazil) for their financial support, and Professor Fernando Iazzettafor his accurate contribution of ideas and discussions.

Organised Sound 14(1): 27–37 & 2009 Cambridge University Press. Printed in the United Kingdom. doi:10.1017/S1355771809000053

and the artistic object. In this case, sound can even beconsidered in an expanded concept of sculpture: as asculpture material; as something plastic that can beshaped, manipulated, deformed or even restructured.While the sound discourse in traditional music tendsto be more narrative and teleological, in sound artthe narrativity does not occur through a temporalstructuring of sounds, but through the referencesprovoked by these sounds. There is no need for anelaborated temporal string of sound elements, ashappens in music. On the contrary, sounds are fre-quently pointing out visual and spatial elements.

To understand how sound art uses sound materialto construct its representational discourse, we willconcentrate on two aspects that are the basis of thisrepertoire: space and time.

2. SPACE

One of the transformations accomplished by electro-acoustic music in the mid twentieth century was theappropriation of space as a musical element. However,in this process there was a reduction in the idea ofspatialisation to the concept of a projection of soundsin space. Thus, the electroacoustic project devotedconsiderable attention to developing strategies to createthe perception of sound source localisation (front/back, left/right), sonic planes (close/distant), and vir-tual acoustic spaces (small/large, dry/reverberant). Inthis sense, the acoustic space in electroacoustic music ismainly related to sound data, and the aural perceptionof space is associated with source localisation androom dimensions. It constitutes an acousmatic space(Campesato and Iazzetta 2006: 777) that does notcorrespond to the space where the music is diffused.Electronic devices hidden behind the curtain of loud-speakers construct this virtual space.

In sound art, part of the work is the actual spacewhere it occurs. Multimodal sensations are activatedby acoustical elements and space resonates withsound, leading to sensorial images of dimension,colour, texture, shape and movement. Also, many ofthe references attached to a site can be triggered bysounds and become part of the work. The idea ofspace is translated into the idea of site, incorporatingsocial, psychological, perceptive, acoustic and visualcharacteristics of a place. Space becomes a repre-sentational element in the artwork.

One of the references that emerges in this context is anotion of place that transcends the idea of geometricspace as a measure demarcated by geographical coor-dinates (LaBelle 2006). It incorporates perceptual,social, psychological, acoustical and visual character-istics of a milieu assigned by specific circumstancesand occurrences.

Thus, site-specific brings the idea in which spaceembraces more than geometrical properties: materials

as well as the history they can elucidate, architecturalcontexts, and even the cultural and social conventionsthat regulate the place of exhibition, all become con-stitutive elements of the art work. This practice intro-duced a critique of the modes of art diffusion and ledto a shift from a focus aimed at the object to a widerconcern with the artistic context and environment.

In the case of music, the concert hall is such aconsolidated space that it became extremely difficultto project new musical environments and new formsof music presentation. Even some more sophisticatedproposals of electroacoustic multitrack diffusion didnot break up the formal configuration of a concerthall in which space serves as an enclosure where themusic is physically constrained and the audience isconfined.

When music crosses the boundaries of the concerthall in search of alternative spaces it is usually recon-figured in new formats such as sound art, soundinstallation, and performance. The art gallery becomesan alternative space to host musical and sonic arts. Butif the concert hall enforces its own ritual and tradi-tions, the gallery also provides a new type of spacewith its own conventions. Like the concert hall, thegallery’s walls and rooms also impose a clear demar-cation of what is inside and what is outside.

2.1. Space in music and sound art

The art gallery has established itself as an almostneutral and aseptic space, sealed (without windows),especially built to isolate the work of art from anyexternal event: a white cube.

The ideal gallery subtracts from the work of art all theevidence that interfere in the fact that it is ‘art’. Thework is isolated from anything that might undermine its

appreciation. This provides the room with a character-istic presence of other spaces in which conventions arepreserved by the repetition of a closed system of values.

Some of the holiness of the church, of the formality ofthe court, of the mystique of the experimental labora-tory is joined to a fashionable design to produce aunique chamber of aesthetics. (O’Doherty 2002: 03)

The gallery’s white walls lead to a contemplativeattitude from the spectator, who, framed by social rules,keeps a relative distance from the work, establishing arelationship that is more rational than physical, cor-poral or sensorial. The contemplative detachment isclearly a remnant of an almost religious attitude, inwhich the aseptic white cube and the concert hall arepart of an almost sacred conception of art.

The installation attempts to transform the ‘whitecube’ into a ‘black cube’: as it weakens the idea ofsacred, it brings the viewer to a closer relationshipwith the work, and transforms the site into anencompassing environment (Campesato 2007). Blackcubes are inhabited by loudspeakers and screens, and

28 Lılian Campesato

the dark walls become invisible, providing the crea-tion of a virtual space in which new perceptivemodalities are stimulated. Thus, the context becomescontent and the viewer becomes part of the work,emphasising the idea of immersion. Material elementsand creative procedures are transformed.The installation is configured as a new way of pre-

senting the work of art. The listener is not confined to afixed position in space, but is invited to create his or herown spatial relationship with the work (Campesato2007). While publishing music is traditionally achievedthrough performance (or at least by recording), instal-lation art configures itself as ‘the possibility of pub-lishing [the music] without performance’ (Aldrich 2003)in a way that the listener is free to establish his or herown link with the time of the work and with the spacewhere it happens.

2.2. Three instances of space in music and sound art

Any art form that takes sound as its main material isa temporal art form since sound can only happen intime. In music and in other types of sound art, timecan be associated with space forms on different levelsof relevance. We can analyse some of the spatialaspects that are put into resonance by sound in musicand sound art, showing how they are explored inrecent works. For this purpose we will establish threecategories of spatial relationship with sound andanalyse their role in the art. The three categories areacoustical space, architectural space and representa-tional space.

2.2.1. Acoustical space

Acoustical space embraces the perceptual acousticcharacteristics of space, such as volume, reverbera-tion and sound source localisation. Acoustic phe-nomena are used to provide psychoacousticimpressions of a space. This instance is related towhat is generally called spatialisation in electro-acoustic music, or stereophonic image in the processof sound recording and mixing in a studio. Basically,it is related to the localisation of sound sources andtheir movements in space. Also, the reverberantcharacteristics of a perceived sound allow the per-ception of some spatial aspects such as volume orshape, and can even provide some hints about thetype and position of surfaces constituting that space.In the last decades electroacoustic music has devel-

oped many systems and strategies to deal with soundspatialisation. From the first experiences with multi-channel composition in electronic music in the 1950s tothe set-up of large loudspeaker orchestras, to thedevelopment of new spatialisation techniques and pro-tocols, space found its way into the musical agenda.In sound art, space has become the material that

constitutes the essence of many works as they

emphasise the acoustic effects produced by controlledprojection of sound sources. Not only is sound itselfperceived in relation to space, but also the acousticaland psychoacoustical characteristics of sound spatialdimensions are employed to emphasise the archi-tectural characteristics of a particular place. In fact,many sound art works explore psychoacousticalaspects by focusing on the perceptual subtleties ofsound events. They seek to stimulate the spectatorto understand acoustical phenomena that are notusually taken into account, even in the processes oflistening to music (Campesato 2007).One example is the installation Plight (Anthony

d’Offray Gallery 1985), created by German artistJoseph Beuys, well known for his ritualistic perfor-mances and his participation in the Fluxus Group. Inthis installation there is a conceptual use of the acousticspace as it uses a highly sound-absorbent materialto cover all the surfaces of a room (figure 1). Thismaterial eliminates the room’s natural reverberationand creates an extreme perceptive distinction betweenthe external and internal acoustic spaces. Inside theroom the sensation is as if all the sounds in the envir-onment have been absorbed by the covered surfaces.There is no need to play specific sounds or music toperceive the acoustical changes: environmental noisesor sounds produced by the visitor are sufficient totrigger attention to the unusual acoustics. Inside theroom a piano remains silent as if its sounds were alsodrawn by the absorbent surfaces.In Stationen (1992), Robin Minard creates an

installation where ‘space itself becomes a musicalinstrument and architecture an acoustic event’(Schulz 1999: 99). In this work, loudspeakers areplaced around the stairwell and the bell tower ofBerlin’s Parochial Church (figure 2). These loud-speakers reproduce natural and synthetic sounds thatare integrated to the acoustics of the environmentwithout disturbing it. Some of the sounds are produced

Figure 1. Detail of Plight, by Joseph Beuys.

A Metamorphosis of the Muses 29

and controlled by a computer and are reproducedby loudspeakers placed in positions of the buildingfollowing a vertical organisation in which the registerof the sounds changes gradually from low to high asone ascends the stairwell into the bell tower room.The filtering of higher frequencies and the integrationof loudspeakers with the environment make it diffi-cult to localise the sound sources, providing a verydiffuse sound reproduction.In both works, space is made evident by the sounds.

Also, sound materials establish a relationship of reso-nance with the space where it is produced. While inmusic the practice of spatialisation remains attached tothe idea of sound-source localisation and displacement,in sound art works space tends to acquire a moreeffective role by establishing more direct connectionsbetween sounds and the acoustic behaviour of thesesounds in a particular environment.

2.2.2. Architectural space

Architectural space relates to the conception of auralarchitecture developed by Blesser and Salter (2007), inwhich sounds are able to shape a sonic space thatcarries specific functions and representationalpotentialities. This conception leads to a close rela-tion between the place where sounds are projectedand the way one listens to it, creating a listeningspace. In this sense it shares characteristics of bothacoustical and representational spaces.Different from a soundscape, in which sounds are

important in themselves, in aural architecture, soundsilluminate space (Blesser and Salter 2007: 16). Inelectroacoustic music the idea of spatialisation focuses

on sounds themselves and on their movement acrossa virtual space: sounds are made evident by theirmovement. In aural architecture, by contrast, sonicsources are placed in order to reveal space. In thiscontext space is not only taken as a physical dimen-sion, but also considered in its social, perceptual andexperiential aspects.According to Blesser and Salter (2007: 64), one can

experience space in four modes: ‘social, as an arenafor community cohesion; navigational, as localobjects and geometries that combine into a spatialgeometry; aesthetic, as an enhanced aesthetic texture;and musical, as an artistic extension of instruments’.These modes can coexist and their relevance dependson the cognitive strategies adopted in a particularcontext.Music seldom directs attention towards space in this

sense, even when it incorporates spatial aspects in thecompositional process, as we have already mentionedregarding electroacoustic music. Of course, when onelistens to a sacred piece inside a church or to anorchestral concert in a park on a Sunday morning, theenvironment becomes part of the music and one canestablish connections between contextual character-istics of those spaces and the music being performed,but these connections are more accidental than inten-tional. In this case, the relationship between music andspace is more related to the particularity of a perfor-mance than to the compositional conception of thework. Thus, space usually draws attention to musicalaspects.In the field of sound art, many works may invert

this balance by using sounds and music to emphasise– or, as Blesser and Salter (2007) would say, to illu-minate – space. Some artists may employ sound toput space into resonance and use this resonance toamplify the referential potentiality of space. RobinMinard has created works for public spaces in whichthe function of music is redefined in relation to noisyenvironments. He creates a kind of spatial composi-tion for public spaces that receive the artwork with-out losing their original functionality. Consequently,Minard has ‘left the protected concert hall to dealwith the actual acoustic space of the urban world’(Schulz 1999: 27), shaping acoustic spaces to becomeworks to be listened to. The use of public spacesrequires the creation of strategies to guide the lis-tener’s attention to the sounds that compose thenatural and urban environment at the same time thatthe artist ‘deconstructs and recombines the acousticmaterial to create an oscillating effect’ (Schulz 1999:29) in which one can establish new connectionsregarding the familiar sounds that inhabit a place.The resonance of these ideas can be noted in Brunnen

(1994). This installation consists of three rectangularblue acrylic boxes asymmetrically located on the floor(figure 3). Inside the boxes are loudspeakers that

Figure 2. Detail of Stationen, by Robin Minard, Paro-chialkirche, Berlin, 1992.

30 Lılian Campesato

transmit a mixture of natural and synthetic sounds ofwater. Each of the acrylic columns placed close to thespeakers are tuned in intervals a quarter-tone apart,producing small frequency variations in the environ-ment (Schulz 1999). It is interesting to note that thework was installed at the entrance of the Mozarteum inSalzburg, whose traditional fountain was replaced bythe blue boxes, producing an intriguing integrationbetween the current space and the memory of theprevious acoustic space. Moreover, there is a strongspatial relationship created by the formal similaritybetween the boxes and windows of the building thatsurround the plant.In Silent Music (1994), the artist uses about 400

piezo-electric loudspeakers fixed on walls and othersurfaces (figure 4). Attached to their wires the loud-speakers assume plant-like forms that resemblebioorganic structures (Schulz 1999). The arrangementof the loudspeakers creates the impression that theysearch for the light as if they were real plants. Thework is conceived for both traditional exhibitionspaces and public areas such as gardens and parks.Sounds are composed by synthetic and naturalsources and are specially conceived to be incorpo-rated into the environment.Generally, in public spaces, the artist must deal with

the fact that sounds and other elements of that spacecarry their own specific meanings, because sounds areattached to the context of their places of origin. In thistype of work, Minard adds previously composedsounds to the site that lead to a perception that ‘hoversbetween identifying familiar phenomena and notingunexpected musical sounds’ (Schulz 1999: 29).

2.2.3. Representational space

Representational space refers to images, contexts andconcepts that are related to a specific site and can betriggered by sounds. It focuses more on the histori-cal and contextual elements of a place than on its

geometrical delimitation and physical configuration.While instrumental and electroacoustic music main-tained a discourse based on abstract sound relationsthat are constructed through references to the musicaldiscourse, sound art tends to generate a representa-tional discourse full of references that point out con-cepts and contexts that are external to the work itself.In music, referentiality is inserted into the temporaldiscourse as a basis for the musical narrative. In soundart referentiality is usually extra-musical, thus it canoperate through other resources such as the physicalor imaginary space where it is presented. If musictends to establish a linear discourse whose elements aredeeply attached to musical grammar, by its turn soundart uses sound in a more representational way. Thus,its discourse does not need to be based on temporalstructures – as is the case of music – but it can lead toother types of configurations in which conceptualideas are referred to its sonic constructions.For this reason time dimension in sound art is

somehow condensed. Usually sound art works do notimpose a linear temporal organisation of sound ele-ments. Many of these works do not provide a specificbegining or end, allowing the spectator to enter andleave the work at any time. As the use of timebecomes less imposing, it is possible to adhere to aspatial discourse, typical of the visual arts. In thesame way that sound became essential to twentieth-century music, space plays a central role in therepertoire of sound art.An example of a highly representational use of

space is the work Zwolf Turen und zwolf Klange(Twelve Doors and Twelve Sounds, 2000) by ChristinaKubisch. It is part of a series of installations entitled

Figure 3. Brunnen, by Robin Minard, Mozarteum, Salz-burg, 1994.

Figure 4. Silent Music, by Robin Minard, StadtgalerieSaarbrucken, 1999.

A Metamorphosis of the Muses 31

‘consecutio temporum’. Works on this series are cre-ated for rooms that have gone through differenthistorical changes. Zwolf Turen und zwolf klange wasset on the second floor of the Opel Villa building inRusselsheim (Kubisch 2000). The place was con-structed in 1930 and since then it has assumed dif-ferent purposes: it was originally used as a floor forservants, later as a hospital and, during the SecondWorld War, for military purposes.The installation consists of twelve white lacquered

doors each with a white loudspeaker in front of it;the loudspeakers are list by lamps hanging above thedoors (figure 5). This lighting reveals traces of thebuilding’s history by illuminating some cracks andsmall marks. These details guide the public throughthe history that emerges from the architecture. It isworth noting the metaphorical use of sounds inrelation to the environment. Loudspeakers areinstalled in the threshold of each lacquered door andeach door reflects both the image and the sound of theloudspeaker. The sounds are produced by electronicdevices in twelve soundtracks. Their extremely highfrequencies are close to the human hearing thresholdand work as a tapestry that involves the space.Regarding Kubisch’s particular conception of an

archaeological space in this work, Carsten Ahrens,curator of the exhibition comments that:

In the luminous dark, the traces of time become visible.Fissures and wounds in the structure of the room’s wall

appear; our glance and our thoughts follow the patterns

of their lines, tracing a journey into what is past. Thehistory of the site becomes a history of question marks, an

empty space our curiosity seeks to fill. (Ahrens 2000: 58)

In these three spatial instances mentioned above –acoustic space, architectural space, and representa-tional space – there is a progression from a moreobjective conception of space to an abstract, refer-ential one. If music repertoire tends towards the firstinstance, sound art usually explores the potentialitiesof the three of them. Thus, space not only points tointernal sonic structures of the work, but also createsa web of connections with ideas, contexts and storiesthat lie outside the work.

3. TIME

Time in music is usually built by a relatively extendeddiscourse where structural units of different durationsare articulated. Thus, the constitution of a musicalform is inevitably dependent upon time, which isarticulated in segments such as sections, periods andphrases. From the point of view of formal composi-tion, sound is generally used to build temporalstructures (cells, phrases, motives) that create tem-poral arrangements of repetition, variation, devel-opment and rupture.

On the other hand, in the repertoire of sound arttime frequently appears condensed or suspended.Sound structures usually lead to acoustic qualities orconcepts that renounce a more extensive or elabo-rated temporal development. Instead of long dis-cursive forms, as can be found in music, whichdemand the listener to follow each phase of thecomposition, from beginning to end, sound art makesuse of either short elements which can condense itsmeaning in a brief moment, or of repetitive elementswhich generate a static character.

While music, especially concert music, demands alinear and successive following of discourse, be it moreor less fragmented, time in sound art is the duration ofrecognition and fruition of the work in its environment.In general, there is no explicit demarcation of thebeginning or the end of a work and its durationdepends on the intention and the interest of the spec-tator. Thus, the sound elements are not sustained bytheir temporal connection but by their immediatemeaning and their relationship with other non-temporalelements, such as concepts or the space itself.

3.1. Time in music and sound art

The discursive joining of sound elements in musiccomposition enables the construction of complex andextensive narrative structures. According to Pasler(1993: 5), narrativity is widely connected to memoryin the domain of art. Therefore, referentiality, being

Figure 5. Detail of Zwolf Turen und zwolf Klange, byChristina Kubisch, 2000.

32 Lılian Campesato

internal or external to the discourse, becomes animportant feature to be analysed in the artistic context.In music, narrative mainly points out an internal

memory of the discourse. A certain music excerptfrequently leads us to another musical excerpt or, atleast, to another musical structure. One can think ofthe idea of development in the sonata form, which isa constant re-elaboration of the thematic materialimpinged upon the memory. In electroacoustic music,in which the sound material is a unifying elementof the work, the memory of previous sounds is alsorecurrent.In sound art, even in works that are based on

musical structures, narrativity is related to the mem-ory of facts that exist outside the work. In this case,the main difference of discourse organisation residesin the referentiality process. For example, in theinstallation Sound Cooking (1984, Stuttgart) by RolfJulius, there is a loudspeaker suspended by a wirewith the drivers facing up. On the driver there is a redpowder that vibrates while the speaker reproduceslow sounds of a cello (Schulz and Gercke 1996: 83).The way the cello phrases are presented constitutes anessential aspect, but the memory and references theyevoke are related to something that is located outsidethe sounds. The strongest reference is connected tothe work’s title, as the central object in the installa-tion resembles a cooking pan. In this case, the nar-rative is diluted as the sequential string of elementsis established individually by the viewer and thetemporal element becomes secondary.Another important element to be pointed out

regarding temporal construction of sound art worksis the overlay of elements used in creation. Whilemusical narrativity is built mainly through a sounddiscourse, in sound art temporality is made up of theinterconnection of different elements such as video,sound devices, recordings, images and lights. Eachone of these elements can constitute different tem-poralities that coexist inside the same work.In sound art time is closely related to the proces-

sual development of works. Instead of an over-emphasis on the art object itself, which is related to ateleological organisation of sound elements in time,sound art narrative appears diluted or fragmented,raising the process to the focus of the work. When thefocus of a work relies on the process through which itis accomplished, its structuring of time comes to astate of rest. The work becomes an ephemeral eventwhose duration is determined by its processes. Theidea of a culminating point is diluted, opening roomfor a synchronicity of times that are triggered byreferences that carry their own present. Thus, soundart works tend towards an aesthetics of the ephem-eral, of the transitory, at the same time that theycondense historically distinctive elements in the samespace and time.

Perhaps the main difference between the concep-tion of time in art forms such as painting, sculptureand even music and the one that is practised in soundart and installation art in general lies in the way theviewer experiences the work. In an installation theviewer physically enters the work, follows its elementsstep by step, feels it and is affected by it. Time attainsa distinctive characteristic because it requires theparticipation of the viewer to be established. The timeof a work is often the time assigned by the viewer tothat particular work. This time, however, moves froma temporal structure that has been established inadvance, as is the case with music, to a structure thattakes place through the exchange of experiencesbetween the viewer and the work. It goes from a workthat encloses its precepts and form to an open work,in which the elements are usually constituted in anindeterminate way.

In this sense, the time of experience sets the dura-tion of a work. In Western music, the duration of thework, although relative, is preconceived in the com-position. Apart from some examples of indeterminatemusic, the duration of musical elements are usuallypre-determined. This is valid for the relative tempo ofa musical passage as well as for the more preciseduration of a recorded electroacoustic piece. Itdoesn’t matter how much duration is defined by thecomposer, or even by the interpreter, music alwayspresupposes a fundamental factor: it lasts. Even in awork that challenges the traditional music structuresuch as Cage’s 403300, the piece is framed by itsduration no matter how loosely one can consider thetime indicated in its title. Its performance is shapedby musical gestures that mark its beginning and end.

By its turn, in sound art duration is seldom takenas a crucial factor. Even when the material thatconstitutes a work has a temporal nature (sounds,music, video) and is arranged in time, the viewerdecides when to enter or leave it. Temporal con-struction in sound art is much more dependent uponthe viewer than the creator. Even when time ischronologically established, as is the case when arecorded sound has a fixed duration, the viewerchooses his or her own course through the work anddecides how much time is necessary for its fruition.This approach to time is much more determined bythe fruition of work than by the creation itself.

3.2. Temporal aspects of the repertoire

Although we have approached some aspects of narra-tivity, discourse, memory and referentiality that con-stitute the concept of time in sound art, we are far fromdefining the diversity of modes of temporal construc-tion that can be observed in this repertoire. Amongstthis diversity, one cannot ignore the representativegroup of works on the borderline of performance art,

A Metamorphosis of the Muses 33

or the ones based on a linear temporal discourse suchas audiovisual works.

Among the temporal strategies that characterisethe sound art repertoire, one can acknowledge threesignificant strategies: an idea of stasis or static timethat is conceived by the cyclical repetition of struc-tures or by the regular maintenance of elements; theconception of distinct temporal scales; and the use ofpunctual and unitary structures which synthesise thesound construction.

3.2.1. Stasis and silence

A static sound construction is usually accomplishedthrough the constant repetition of elements orthrough an extremely slow variation. Many sound artworks are built according to this principle of soundimmobility, approaching a conception which valuesthe process instead of the narrative directionality.This resource, also widely applied in minimal music,generates an effect of temporal suspension by theexhaustive repetition of elements or by the extremelyslow variation of sound materials.The work Infinitation (2007) by the sound artist

Bernhard Gal and the architect Yumi Kori is anexample of this time conception in which constantsound textures create a static character that, as timepasses, brings the sensation of silence. Suspendedglowing red tubes and mirrors are arranged in a darksite to create a virtual ‘infinite’ space. The idea ofinfinite is reinforced by continuous sound texturesmade of micro-tonal sequences. By combining visualand acoustic elements, this work provides a sensorialexperience of ‘infinitation’. The apparent boundless-ness of the environment and the static repetitivesounds create a type of silence (figure 6).While silence in music is usually taken as a coun-

terpart of sound, situated as a tension element inrelation to sound, in sound art silence can be con-stituted as a fundamental element of the work. Bycreating a situation emptied of sound events, silenceno longer establishes temporal marks, but leads to thesensation of a static time that does not flow.

3.2.2. Distinct temporal scales

In the case of using distinct temporal dimensions, itmight be useful to recall Stockhausen’s ideas onmusical time structuring. In his paper yhow timepassesy, written in 1959 (Stockhausen 1959), thecomposer proposes a structural and unifyingapproach in relation to time in music, gathering ele-ments such as pitch, timbre, rhythm and form under acommon temporal axis. Although his paper empha-sises the serialist expectations of unifying the musicstructure around the series, due to the broader tem-poral conception that sets up his discourse, one caneasily apply it to analyse some examples of sound art.

The idea of superposing different time scales can befound, for example, in some works by Felix Hessthat turn inaudible infra-sounds into regular sounds.In Air Pressure Fluctuations (2000), Hess recordedinfra-sounds – that is, air pressure variations whosefrequencies are below the threshold of human per-ception – and reproduced them 360 times faster thanthe original recording (Schulz 2001). That means thatone second of sound on the accelerated recordingcorresponds to six minutes of the original recordingtime. The whole work is 20 minutes and 38 seconds,which corresponds to 5 days, 3 hours and 49 secondsof infra-sound recording. Thus, the sharp noise heardin the frequency band around 1000Hz refers, in fact,to sound frequencies around 2.7Hz (1000/360). In thiscase, the sounds reproduced by the recorded CD cor-respond to vibrations that originally occurred in theband between 0.03Hz and 56Hz. By speeding up theoriginal air pressure variations, disturbances comingfrom motor vibrations, factory gears and train enginesbecame audible. It’s interesting to note that at everyfour minutes in the CD, denser textures of whistles andclicks can be heard, probably due to typical increase ofactivities early in the morning in a city.Another interesting example of the use of different

temporal scales is the work of the German ensembleGranular, Synthesis, a pair of artists who havedeveloped collaborative works since 1991. In Modell 5(1994–96), they incorporated the conception of soundgranular synthesis in an audiovisual work.Modell 5 is akind of video installation, an improvisation that cameout from previously recorded images of a woman’sface, who produces sounds, either speaking, sneezingor shouting. In the work, both sounds and images aresubmitted to a similar granulation process. Althougheach grain carries little information in its limitedduration, when showed in a fast succession they form atemporal texture in which sound and image appear tobe synchronised (figure 7).

Figure 6. Installation ‘Infinitation’ by Bernhard Gal andYumi Kori, 2007.

34 Lılian Campesato

The outcome of this process is very interesting as itmanages to generate many structural variations ofimage and sound in a highly controlled way. Theperception oscillates from the scale of milliseconds(the dimension of an isolated grain) to seconds (thetextures formed by the succession of grains) tominutes (the duration of the piece). In the real-timeperformance the artists can move from staticmoments, in which the viewer reaches a hypnoticimmersion, to sudden changes of time.

3.2.3. Short and punctual structures

Another way to organise time found very frequentlyin the sound art repertoire is the use of short, unitaryand punctual structures. Instead of a concatenationof distinct parts, as occurs in music or cinematicnarratives, only a single element is presented, whichsynthesises the whole idea of the work.The One Second Sculpture (1969), by American

experimental artist Tom Marioni, illustrates this idea.The work consists of a metal tape measure takenapart, and thrown into the air. While it is falling, themetal tape flies like a spring in the air and produces aloud sound. For a moment, the tape’s trajectory cre-ates distinctive and unpredicted shapes in space until itdrops to the floor (LaBelle and Roden 1999: 121).A more emblematic and developed example of this

idea can be found in the work of Spanish sound artistJose Antonio Orts (Zaplana 1999) (figure 8). Most ofhis pieces consist of short and sometimes uniqueelements that synthesise the temporal conception ofthe work. In some of his works short sounds triggeredby the audience generate static rhythmic structures,without a beginning or an end. His sound objects are,at the same time, sound sources and sculptures. Theartist creates small devices that generate soundsthrough simple electronic circuits connected to smallloudspeakers, hidden in metallic tubes of differentdimensions. The resonances of the tubes are coupled

with the resonances of the environment itself. Timeoscillates between a musical time (since there areelements of rhythmic development) and a time offruition established by each viewer. Even the titles ofhis works indicate this temporal conception: Ostinatoperpetuo (1998), Territorio rıtmico (1999), Ritmosluminosos (1999).

4. CONCLUSION

The starting point of this article was the investigationof the relations of productive forces in both sound artand music. The survey of approximations and dif-ferences in their repertoires was an essential elementfor the development of this work. Starting from thissurvey it was possible to perform an analysis ofartistic forms instituted by sound art, specifically inrelation to its treatment of sound in space and timeand the consequences of this treatment in the con-stitution of a particular type of discourse.

One of the first contentions raised in this work wasthe observation of a kind of deviation introduced bysound art in the regular path of creative use of soundmaterial in music. On one hand, sound art repertoiredevelops a discursive approach which is very distinctfrom the one that guides music compositional struc-tures. On the other hand, it absorbs modes of pro-duction typically found in the visual arts domain.Sound art differs from music and from other artforms in which sound plays an important role(cinema, for example) by establishing new possibi-lities of appreciation and listening. Its distinctive use

Figure 7. Video still from Modell 5 by Granular, Synthesis.

Figure 8. Detail of the sound installation Blanco ostinato,

1997 by Jose Antonio Orts.

A Metamorphosis of the Muses 35

of sound, the absence of a linear temporal discourse,the exploration of the referential potentialitiesbrought by sound, the effective interaction betweenthe audience, and the space and time in which thework occurs, all of these aspects collaborate todistinguish sound art as a discrete artistic modality.

If these aspects are not exclusive to this repertoire,they can be a starting point to map out its produc-tion. They raise interesting questions about processesthat are essential to the formation of sound art andcan be condensed into three relevant aspects.

The first relates to the role that sound plays in thecreation of these works. In fact, the sound is the mainelement, the one that grounds other aspects of thework. The articulation of sound elements can be donein different ways. Sometimes it can be only anindirect reference to a sonic event. In other cases itoccurs through the exploration of circumstantial dataof the environment in which the work takes place.Frequently there is an emphasis on the metaphoricalpotential that a sound can raise along with the con-sequent chain of references it can trigger.

The second aspect to be pointed out is the rele-vance of the referential aspects that a work can gen-erate. Here, sound art tends to be quite different frommusic. In music referentiality is generally achievedinside its own discourse. It builds its discoursethrough the variation, contrast and development ofinternal references in order to articulate a temporalnarrative. In sound art, the contextual referencesusually point to what is outside the work. Its narra-tive does not need to be temporal: it can be built uponthe articulation of diverse elements such as images,sound, or the site where it takes place.

Finally, the third aspect to be emphasised is thecontextual element. By incorporating context as anessential aspect of the work, sound art opens new andrich possibilities of connection between sound andother ‘silent’ elements such as images, gestures orspaces. In this sense the idea of an architectural spacecan be seen as one of the most relevant contributionsof sound art to integrate temporal and spatial ele-ments. In sound art the space, with all references itcan carry, becomes as audible as any sound it canhold.

Beginning with Modernism, there seems to be atendency in music to conceive sound as a phenom-enon unattached to any context, which does not pointout its own acoustic and psychoacoustic qualities.This tendency has somehow contaminated the arts ingeneral to the extent that Douglas Kahn (Kahn1999), based on Dan Lander’s previous reflections(Lander and Lexier 1990), claims that sound, as anartistic element, was polarised by music and followeda discursive path according to a specific grammarthat, even being experimental, maintained a tele-ological trajectory.

Here we return to the initial idea of this text: thatsound has followed two distinct trajectories withinthe arts. On one hand there is the musical path, inwhich sound is inserted in a self-referential grammarand in a discourse that points towards a musical lis-tening. As stated before, this is notable in PierreSchaeffer’s and John Cage’s thoughts, for instance.On the other hand, one can detect a tendency in otherarts to explore representational and contextualaspects of sound. This path takes an opposingdirection in relation to a process that can be under-stood as the ‘musicalisation of sound’ and leads todifferent forms of expression and to new intentions ofappreciation of sound in an aesthetic context. Theconsequence is that these new sound conceptionsfrequently found in non-traditional artistic fields,such as sound art itself, promote an interchangeamong distinctive discourses and contribute toenlarge the frontiers of music as well as the other artforms in which sound plays an important role. Byand large, sound installations, sound sculptures andall the diverse artistic possibilities incorporated bysound art are changing the way we think of soundand what we imagine that music will become.

REFERENCES

Ahrens, C. 2000. Sonorus Light Space. In C. Kubisch,KlangRaumLichtZeit. Heidelberg: Kehrer Verlag.

Aldrich, N.B. (2003). What is Sound Art? http://emfinstitute.emf.org/articles/aldrich03/aldrich.html

Blesser, B. and Salter, L.-R. 2007. Spaces Speak, are you

Listening? – Experiencing aural architecture. Cambridge,MA: MIT Press.

Campesato, L. 2007. Arte sonora: uma metamorfose dasmusas. Master Thesis, Sao Paulo: University of Sao

Paulo – Music Department.Campesato, L. and Iazzetta, F. 2006. Som, espaco e tempo

na arte sonora. Proceedings of the XVI Congresso da

Associacao Nacional de Pesquisa e Pos-Graduacao emMusica. Brasılia: ANPPOM, 777–80.

Dyson, F. 1992. The ear that would hear sounds in them-

selves: John Cage 1935–1965. In D. Kahn and G.Whitehead (orgs.) Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio,and Avant-Garde. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Kahn, D. 1999. Noise Water Meat: A history of sound in thearts. Cambridge, MA, London: The MIT Press.

Kubisch, C. 2000. KlangRaumLichtZeit. Heidelberg:Kehrer Verlag.

LaBelle, B. 2006. Background Noise: Perspectives on soundart. New York, London: Continnum.

LaBelle, B. and Roden, S. (eds.) 1999. Site of Sound: Of

architecture & the ear. Los Angeles: Errant Bodies Press.Lander, D. and Lexier, M. (eds.) 1990. Sound by Artists.

Toronto: Art Metropole.

O’Doherty, B. 2002. No interior do cubo branco: a ideologiado espaco da arte [Inside the White Cube: The Ideologyof the Gallery Space]. Sao Paulo: Martins Fontes.

36 Lılian Campesato

Pasler, J. 1993. Postmodernism, narrativity, and theart of memory. Contemporary Music Review 7(2):

3–32.Schaeffer, P. 1966. Traite des objects musicaux. Paris: Edi-

tions du Seuil.

Schulz, B. (ed.) 1999. Robin Minard: Silent music – betweensound art and acoustic design. Heidelberg: KehrerVerlag.

Schulz, B. (ed.) 2001. Felix Hess: Light as air. Heidelberg:Verlag Kehrer.

Schulz, B. and Gercke, H. (eds.) 1996. Rolf Julius: Smallmusic (GRAU). Heidelberg: Verlag Kehrer.

Stockhausen, K. 1959. yyhow time passesyy. Die

Reihe: Musical craftsmanship 3(1): 10–40.Zaplana, E. (ed.) 1999. Jose Antonio Orts. Valencia, Consorci

de museus de la comunitat valenciana.

A Metamorphosis of the Muses 37

Field Recording, Sound Art and Objecthood

JOANNA DEMERS

Department of Musicology, Flora L. Thornton School of Music, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089–0851, USAE-mail: jtdemers@usc.edu

The commercially available field recordings of Francisco

Lopez and Toshiya Tsunoda are difficult to classify. These

field recordings are not site specific in the conventional sense

because they are not tied to a particular architectural or

listening space. Nor can field recordings be categorised as just

another subgenre of experimental electronic music. Whereas

in musique concrete and acousmatic music, sounds are

organised according to musical or thematic parameters,

Lopez’s and Tsunoda’s field recording sounds are subjected

to minimal editing and processing, and are organised

according to the innate traits of the sounds themselves.

It would be insufficient, however, to offer the usual

conciliatory conclusion that Lopez’s and Tsunoda’s

recordings straddle the sound art/music divide by posses-

sing qualities of both. This article argues that these field

recordings can best be understood in relation to the visual arts

concept of objecthood, Michael Fried’s term for deciphering

minimalist sculpture of the late 1960s. Objecthood explains

how these field recordings use appropriated sounds that are

nonetheless treated as non-referential, autonomous materials.

This strategy posits its own type of site specificity that

purports to be acultural and ahistorical, yet is nevertheless

steeped in culture and history.

In his recent monograph, Alan Licht complains thatthe term sound art has become a fashionable affec-tation for experimental musicians who want to ‘playthe art card’ (Licht 2007: 210–11). For Licht, soundart and music cannot be regarded as interchangeableterms because of two critical distinctions: music isheard in performance venues while sound art is heardin exhibition spaces, and music is narrative whilesound art is immersive.At first blush, this sort of insistence on the bound-

aries between two art forms whose own definitions aremurky might seem like quibbling. There is also the riskof overgeneralisation: not all music is narrative in thesense that Licht means of having materials that developand transform through the course of a work. ButLicht’s desire to explain what makes sound art unique isnonetheless understandable. The prevalent definitionsof sound installations and sound art (Cox and Warner2004; Davis 2003; Licht 2007; LaBelle 2006) assert thatthis difference lies in ‘site specificity’, meaning thatsounds are constructed to interact with the locationswhere they are heard. Through this emphasis on loca-tion, site-specific art works expose the artificial demar-cation between themselves and the venues in which they

are encountered, venues that, according to the logicof autonomous art, are meant to be invisible and thusexempt from critical examination. This interactionwith location could be acoustical, as in enlisting theparticular spatial characteristics of an environment(see works by Max Neuhaus), or it could be thematic,as in incorporating aspects of a particular location’shistory, culture or ecology (see works by HildegardWesterkamp). In both scenarios, site specificity cri-tiques the boundaries that have traditionally separatedthe art work from the outside world. As such, soundart encompasses not only sounds but the architecturaland acoustical properties that shape and nurture them,as well as the larger societies that generate them.

While it is certainly true that many works of soundart are site specific in the sense outlined above, not allare. In this article, I want to consider field recordingsby two people frequently described as sound artists,Francisco Lopez and Toshiya Tsunoda. AlthoughLopez and Tsunoda have done extensive work with site-specific installations, the recordings I interrogate here(Tsunoda’s Scenery of Decalcomania (2003) and Ridgeof Undulation (2005), and Lopez’s La Selva (1998),Buildings [New York] (2001), and Wind [Patagonia](2007)) are commercially available, inherently mobile,and thus detached from any particular venue or auralarchitecture. They can be heard whenever and whereverthe listener likes, and seem best suited to the interiorexperience of headphone listening. In other words, theyare not site specific in the typical sense. Yet they seemequally ill-served by the moniker of music. Sparse andlong-lasting, these field recordings display little of theediting or compositional intervention that categorisemuch musique concrete and acousmatic music. Lopez’sand Tsunoda’s works are found objects of longduration and minute detail, studied explorations ofnatural phenomena whose status as aesthetic objectsis nonetheless patent.

How, then, can these field recordings be consideredsite-specific sound art? One answer is to interrogateone of the primary criteria of site-specific art, that itsmaterials foreground culture and history. I propose amore inclusive definition, namely that the boundariesthat separate the work from the outside world areblurry. In other words, we can understand site-spe-cific sound art as any art that in some manner (but notnecessarily through the lens of culture) addresses the

Organised Sound 14(1): 39–45 & 2009 Cambridge University Press. Printed in the United Kingdom. doi:10.1017/S1355771809000065

topics of site and location. A great deal of site-specificart launches the work into the outside world, whilealso drawing the outside world into the art workthrough explicit appeals to social issues. In Lopez’sand Tsunoda’s field recordings, however, these sameboundaries are semi-permeable: the art work leavesthe exhibit space to inhabit the world, but the worlddoes not impinge on the art work’s self-containedmaterials, which the artists treat as self-referential,autonomous and primary.

To elaborate this position, I want to compareTsunoda’s and Lopez’s field recordings with minim-alist visual art that emerged during the 1960s. Forboth its supporters and detractors, minimalist worksdid not look or behave like either painting or sculp-ture, and assailed the boundaries separating the artwork from the world around it. I argue in this articlethat Lopez’s and Tsunoda’s field recordings exhibit aquality first applied to minimalist works – objecthood– whereby materials refuse to be encased within aframe and instead confront the observer as integralobjects. Objecthood is important to larger reflectionsof site specificity because it provides a vocabulary fordiscussing works whose relationship to a particularlocation is not based on the usual concerns of socialrelevance. In particular, objecthood is pertinentbecause it clarifies some artists’ efforts to appropriateoutside elements as autonomous objects free of resi-dual associations.

1. THE RECORDINGS

Since the late 1980s, Toshiya Tsunoda has made fieldrecordings that capture the collisions and interactionsof vibrations. He works mostly in and around hishometown of Yokohama, Japan, and has recordedsounds both large (ferries as they shuttle across har-bours) and small (birdsongs as heard through thetailpipe of an automobile) in scale. During the 1990s,Tsunoda was affiliated with WrK, a collective ofartists who focused on discovering latent materialswithin natural processes and cultural formalities.This tenure with WrK honed Tsunoda’s talent forunearthing the aesthetic out of the mundane. His tworecent releases, Scenery of Decalcomania (2003) andRidge of Undulation (2005), contain largely anon-ymous sounds: the wind as it blows through a metalrailing; low resonances as heard through very largepipes; waves gently breaking on beaches covered withcoarse sand and stones, and so on. His choices tendtowards sounds that invite treatment as raw materials:

I don’t have a decisive reason for choosing a location,

but rather, it’s simply that places I know well have asense of familiarity. However, it must be a locationwithout any sort of special characteristics, such as a

fishing port, warehouse, etc. (Tsunoda 2007: 86)

Locations ‘without any sort of special character-istics’ yield sounds that are anonymous and becomeabstract after only a few moments. The track ‘WindWhistling’ from Scenery of Decalcomania is a seven-minute recording of the wind blowing through therails of a metal footbridge. Changes in wind intensityproduce what sounds like a wandering atonal melodywith occasional dyads and triads. The duration of thetrack is long enough to lull any initial curiosity aboutthe way in which these sounds are produced. Thehermetic melody is offset at times by intrusions fromthe outside world: a ferry horn, a distant airplaneengine. These brief incidents draw attention to theplacement of the microphone (and, by extension,listener) in relation to the wind sounds: the micro-phone must be close to the railing, very close, as theoutside world seems very far away.

Tsunoda’s explanation of such moments is steeped inthe phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, who argues thatthere is no perception separate of bodily perception: thebody is thus ‘our means of communication with [theworld], to the world no longer conceived as a collectionof determinate objects, but as the horizon latent in allour experience and itself ever-present and anterior toevery determining thought’ (Merleau-Ponty 2002: 106).According to Tsunoda, we perceive events with anawareness of how those events interact with our bodies:

The objects which lead my work are taken from myfieldwork and everyday life, and I treat them as abstract,artificial models. From an objective, scientific viewpoint,

there is no individual perspective/point of view by theobserver. (Tsunoda 2007: 86)

Tsunoda is forthcoming about the origins of hissounds; his titles describe them in general andsometimes even specific terms (‘Filmy Feedback’,‘Curved Pipe’, ‘At Stern, Tokyo Bay, 11 December1997’, etc.), and his liner notes provide even moreinformation, notably the claim that Tsunoda does notedit or process any of his materials (‘I do not processany of my recorded material’, Haynes 2005), limitinghis intervention to the choice and placement ofmicrophones. It is unclear why Tsunoda makes thisstatement given that his recordings do, in fact, displaysome signs of processing (the two anonymousreviewers for this article both felt that Tsunoda hadindeed subjected his materials to some sort of pro-cessing). What is clear is that these materials areultimately treated as integral materials, and, for themost part, if editing or processing have taken placethey are not manifest.

Despite the transparency with which he reveals hissources, Tsunoda treats the provenance of sounds aspurely incidental:

Hearing an incident as music is a matter of culturalbackgrounds. That’s also interesting but I never expecton it [sic]. In my CD on Sirr, there’s a moment where a

40 Joanna Demers

sound of trumpet practicing comes in at the warehouse,but that is not on purpose. It was recorded in an echoing

environment like a cliff, and I think it gave good accent.My aim isn’t to recreate the places exactly but if you puteffects on, it would reduce the meanings of the interests

in physical vibrations. (Plop 2007)

As for my field recording, I do not intend to recreate the

atmosphere of a location; and I am not interested inrecording special situations of historical incidents. [y]I do not record for the sake of making music or simplydiscovering interesting acoustics. I am also not inter-

ested in analysing these sounds scientifically. (Haynes2005)

Among Francisco Lopez’s over two hundred relea-ses are numerous works utilising field recordings.I focus here on the trilogy comprising three albums:La Selva (1998), containing sounds of a rain forest inCosta Rica; Buildings [New York] (2001), containingsounds of offices, apartments and studios in Man-hattan and Brooklyn; and Wind [Patagonia] (2007),containing sounds of the wind blowing through openspaces in southern Argentina. Unlike many of Lopez’sworks, which are referred to simply as ‘Untitled’ and anumeral, this trilogy provides explicit informationconcerning sound origins. All three works featurecopious liner notes containing photographs of thelocations as well as precise timings for each eventwithin the recording. For example, Buildings [NewYork] (2001) captures the repetitive, mechanisedsounds of air conditioners, computers and boilers. Therecording features ten different building environments,each of which plays for a few minutes before fadinginto the next. By following along with the liner notes,the listener can know at any moment where and whena particular section was recorded. Despite this wealthof detail, however, Lopez discourages attention to thesources of sound (i.e., causal listening). In his prefacefor Buildings [New York], Lopez writes:

You might want to know about the background philo-sophy behind this work and about its specific spatial-

temporal ‘reality’. I didn’t want to omit these referentiallevels, because they irremediably exist and I have indeeddealt with them. But I also wanted to emphatically give

you the opportunity to skip them, to have them in yourhands and decide purposefully not to access them. Myrecommendation is – having the knowledge of their

existence – to keep them closed. This is not a game or atrick; it is a confrontation with the relational frameworksthat blur our experience of the essential. (Lopez 2001)

2. OBJECTHOOD

In the following section, I introduce objecthood, acategory describing what were perceived as non-refer-ential materials in 1960s minimalist sculpture. Thisdiscussion is relevant to the field recordings studied herebecause minimalist artists also appropriated objects

from the outside world, and yet also asserted that theseobjects could be perceived as non-referential and viewedas inherent to the art work. Objecthood also providesan alternative framework for site specificity that can, inturn, explain how Tsunoda’s and Lopez’s field record-ings can also be considered site-specific sound art.

2.1. Reduced listening and objecthood

The approaches outlined by Lopez and Tsunoda areclearly indebted to Pierre Schaeffer’s reduced listen-ing (l’ecoute reduite) which has been discussedextensively elsewhere (Chion 1983; Emmerson 2007;Kane 2007), so I summarise only the most pertinentpassages here. Schaeffer describes reduced listening asthe intention to listen only to the sound object (l’objetsonore), Schaeffer’s term for sounds divorced fromtheir source, medium and notation.1 Reduced listen-ing does not come easily; listeners are naturallyinclined to hear sounds either for their informationalvalue (i.e., where they come from, how they areproduced) or for their signification (i.e., what theymean). Reduced listening thus entails a phenomen-ological reduction, a bracketing out of information inorder to arrive at an essential sound, or sound beforeassociations have been ascribed to it. With practice,listeners can develop the discipline necessary to freethemselves from the habits of acculturated listening.2

Of the works considered here, Tsunoda’s encou-rage a modified form of reduced listening, notthrough hiding the origins of his sounds, but throughacknowledging them in an understated manner. Thetitles of tracks on Scenery of Decalcomania are indi-cative of this approach because they provide lessinformation about the specifics of the recordings thando the titles of the later album Ridge of Undulation.‘Unstable Contact’, the opening track on Scenery,

1Schaeffer 1966: 268: ‘Cette intention de n’ecouter que l’objetsonore, nous l’appelons, l’ecoute reduite.’2Schaeffer 1966: 270: ‘Avant qu’un nouvel entraınement me soitpossible et que puisse s’elaborer un autre systeme de references,approprie a l’objet sonore cette fois, je devrai me liberer du con-ditionnement cree par mes habitudes anterieures, passer parl’epreuve de l’epoche. Il ne s’agit nullement d’un retour a la nature.Rien ne nous est plus naturel que d’obeir a un conditionnement. Ils’agit d’un effort anti-naturel pour apercevoir ce qui, precedem-ment, determinait la conscience a son insu.’, and 271: ‘Si nousecartons vigoureusement tout cela – et quelle application il y faut,quels exercices repetes, quelle patience et quelle nouvelle rigueur! –pouvons-nous, nous delivrant du banal, ) chassant le naturel * aussibien que le culturel, trouver un autre niveau, un authentique objetsonore, fruit de l’epoche, qui serait si possible accessible a touthomme ecoutant? Nous avons deja esquisse cette disciplined’ecoute, et le schema auquel elle correspond, en concluant au y 8.9le livre II. Disons aussitot que nous ne pouvons pas vider si vite nisi completement notre conscience de ses contenus habituels, de sesrejets automatiques a des indices ou des valeurs qui orienteronttoujours les perceptions de chacun. Mais il est possible que peu apeu ces differences s’estompent, et que chacun entende l’objetsonore, sinon comme son voisin, du moins dans le meme sens quelui, avec la meme visee. [y] L’objet sonore est a la rencontre d’uneaction acoustique et d’une intention d’ecoute.’

Field Recording, Sound Art and Objecthood 41

makes manifest that the sounds therein are of somesort of electrical signal. But with a duration of overseventeen minutes, the listener’s curiosity about howthat unstable contact is produced is gradually worndown. These repetitive sounds that do not evolve muchover the course of the track instil a sort of semanticfatigue so that, eventually, they seem cut adrift fromthe source origins announced in their titles.

Lopez’s proposed reduced listening poses morechallenges to the listener. He goes to great pains todocument his sources, yet he then asks listeners tochoose not to attend to this information, recallingSchaeffer’s descriptions of reduced listening as a‘discipline’ and an ‘intention of listening’ that must bepractised in order to overcome our natural tendenciestowards causal listening. As with Schaeffer’s originalformulation of reduced listening, Lopez’s ambivalentstance toward sound identification may require fromthe listener a certain indulgence in order to appreciatethe intention behind Lopez’s directives, even thoughthe execution of his premise actually elicits causallistening. And while Lopez is also savvy enough toacknowledge the cultural character of the sounds heusesy

My music is loaded with a multitude of cultural refer-ences, from the soundtrack of ‘Eraserhead’ to some

sound approaches in Buddhism. Whether or not theseare apparent is more a question of perception than ofexplicit explanation. What is essential to it, though, is

the fact that I don’t attach myself to any specific systemof aesthetic, conceptual or spiritual beliefs. I think itsuniversal reach potential is dependent upon the indivi-dual – more than social or cultural – attitudes con-

cerning listening and creation. (Lopez 2000)

yhe feels strongly that musical materials should notbe reduced to their associative properties:

There can only be a documentary or communicativereason to keep the cause-object relationship in the workwith soundscapes, never an artistic/musical one. Actu-

ally, I am convinced that the more this relationship iskept, the less musical the work will be (which is rooted inmy belief that the idea of absolute music and that of

objet sonore are among the most relevant and revolu-tionary in the history of music). [y] A musical com-position (no matter whether based on soundscapes ornot) must be a free action in the sense of not having to

refuse any extraction of elements from reality and also inthe sense of having the full right to be self-referential,not being subjected to a pragmatic goal such as a sup-

posed, unjustified re-integration of the listener with theenvironment. (Lopez 1997)

The universal qualities to which Lopez refers arethose qualities that remain after sounds’ culturalreferences have been bracketed out, resembling what inSchaeffer’s reduced listening is the repression of theinformation-gathering and meaning-gathering listeningmodes, ecouter and comprendre (Kane 2007: 18).

A few years after Schaeffer theorised reduced lis-tening, another form of perceptual reduction beganto take root in minimalist visual arts, among whoseparticipants included Donald Judd, Robert Morrisand Tony Smith. A classic example of minimalist artis Smith’s sculpture Die (1962), a massive, unadornedsix-foot metal cube. What characterises minimalistsculpture is the inclusion of voluminous, solid objectssuch as cubes, steel girders and two-by-fours, as wellas the dissolving of the traditional frames andboundaries separating art works from the outsideworld. Minimalism was met with a trenchant critiquein Michael Fried’s 1967 essay ‘Art and Objecthood’,which condemns minimalist (or what Fried calls ‘lit-eralist’) sculpture. For Fried, minimalist sculpturefunctions as theatre, an experience that simulta-neously confronts and isolates the viewer. Minimalistsculpture is not art because it lacks a frame thatseparates the art work from the viewer. Its incor-poration of everyday objects creates the sense of aliving presence that occupies the same space as theviewer. At stake in minimalist sculpture is a shift inontology, away from art that identifies itself explicitlyas art and towards an objecthood that at times makesserious claims for its status as non-art. What gallsFried is the presence of objects that ‘extort [y] aspecial complicity [y] from the beholder’ (Fried1967: 155). Such objects demand ‘that the beholdertake [them] into account’ as objects rather than asart works, which for Fried is an unforgivable lapse ina work of art because it demands inordinate self-reflection on the part of the beholder.

Objecthood and reduced listening bear strikingsimilarities to one another. Fried’s concept of object-hood entails a bracketing out of the external associa-tions of materials found in minimalist art. As Friedasserts, when objecthood is at play, materials ‘do notrepresent, signify, or allude to anything; they are whatthey are and nothing more’ (Fried 1967: 165). Thissuppression of the provenance of materials constituteda rebellion against the use of illusion in Western visualarts, the use of frames and boundaries to keep the artwork separate from the space of the viewer (Foster,Krauss, Bois and Buchloh 2004: 493). Minimalismwas the first attack on illusion because it brought ele-ments of the outside world back into the art work, yetit still operated with the faith that the resulting artwork could still maintain its autonomy and abstraction(Foster et al. 2004: 495). The site-specific art move-ments that followed minimalism (such as land art andenvironmental art) took the dismantling of illusion onestep further by integrating the art work in the very sitesand spaces where it was displayed. Unconventionalspaces and places, from city sidewalks and open fieldsto the body of the artist, replaced the gallery andmuseum as the locations for art consumption. Thesesites empowered artists to address social issues, from

42 Joanna Demers

environmental deterioration and poverty to HIV/AIDS,that were previously shunned in art (Kwon 2002). Laterforms of site-specific art can thus be understood asacknowledgements of the historical and cultural char-acter of appropriated materials. Minimalism emerges inretrospect as an intermediary step in which it wasthought possible to appropriate outside objects whilebracketing out their associations in a phenomenologicalreduction similar to that in reduced listening.The intrinsic flaw of reduced listening as Schaeffer

conceptualised it is that it assumes that sound has ana priori content that is separate and distinct from anycultural or historical associations it might have sub-sequently acquired. This assertion is problematic onboth practical and theoretical counts. Even with theconcerted effort that Schaeffer called for, listenershave difficulty hearing sounds divorced from theirassociations and, to the contrary, acousmatic situa-tions discourage rather than foster reduced listening(Chion 1990: 32). Reduced listening also focuses somuch attention on minute details of sound that it canfoster perceptual distortions (Smalley 1997). Morefundamentally, reduced listening perpetuates the fal-lacy that there is one universal listening experienceuntouched by culture. As Kane and Windsor haveshown, Adorno forcibly attacked this position, arguingthat sound is always a socially inscribed phenomenon(Kane 2007: 21; Windsor 1996: 143–4). Likewise, theconditions that gave rise to objecthood in minimalistsculpture presupposed an untenable disregard for cul-ture. Robert Fink calls out minimalist apologetics forinsisting on the movement’s detachment from worldlyconcerns (Fink 2005). Reduced listening and object-hood both call on the observer to accept materialsuncritically, to reflect only on their role within the artwork rather than within the world at large. As Kanepoints out, this uncritical acceptance is inherent to thephenomenological method itself, which secures ‘ana priori ontological foundation, but the supposedbenefits of such a foundation are attained at theexpense of historically sedimented ‘‘residual significa-tion’’ ’ (Kane 2007: 22).

2.2. Objecthood and site specificity

Objecthood provides a way of circumventing apotential stumbling block in the reception of fieldrecordings, their mobility and detachment from anyparticular site of listening. Anticipating Licht’sinsistence on the site specificity of sound art, Hegartywrites that sound art

either has to be an installation where the sound occupiesa certain space (or exceeds it) or a performance.Transportable works can be sound art (particularly if we

take self-description as a useful marker), if they areheadphone pieces that ‘guide’ you around a town aurally(Hildegard Westerkamp, Janet Cardiff) or maybe set up

an environment, through site-specific sound recordings,other than the one you are in (Richard Long, Chris

Watson), even if only listening on headphones in thegallery. A CD of sound art that gets played at homeseems less fully part of sound art – despite the growth of

field recordings, ambiences, and recordings of installa-tions. (Hegarty 2007: 171)

One might quip that, under Hegarty’s criteria, all thatis necessary for a work to be counted as sound art is astereo set up in an exhibition space; playing arecording in a gallery of Beethoven’s Ninth Symph-ony, something otherwise universally agreed to bemusic, could therefore be considered sound art. Thisis a flippant joke, but Hegarty in fact discusses a verysimilar installation by Janet Cardiff, her ‘Forty-PartMotet’ in which sixteenth-century composer ThomasTallis’ ‘Spem in alium numquam habui’ is playedback with forty speakers, each transmitting the voiceof an individual singer. As observers walk throughthe installation, their perception of the piece changesaccording to which speaker they hear most closely.The resulting effect is of both the totality of the Talliswork and the ways in which a single singer con-tributes to the whole of the listening experience.

Cardiff is one of the most prominent soundinstallation artists active today, and there is (to myknowledge) no debate as to whether ‘Forty-PartMotet’ counts as sound art.3 This is fine, and I agreewith Licht and Hegarty that the category of sound artis more meaningful if it is distinct from the categoryof music. But if works like Cardiff’s ‘Forty-PartMotet’ are accepted as sound art on the basis of theirliteral anchoring in a physical location (since thematerial of this work is unoriginal and firmly estab-lished as music), would it not be fair to take intoaccount works that exist conversely as being soundart entirely on account of material, in the absence ofsuch anchoring? Is site specificity only determined byphysical placement, or can it also be invoked throughmaterials?

To answer these questions, consider that in Fried’sformulation of objecthood (a formulation that, torecall, appeared a few years before the rise of site-specific art), he seizes upon another undesirable traitof minimalist sculpture, its cultivation of presence atthe expense of presentness. Presence coincides withtheatricality, which Fried says:

confronts the beholder, and thereby isolates him, withthe endlessness not just of objecthood but of time; or as

though the sense which, at bottom, theatre addresses is asense of temporality, of time both passing and to come,

3Cardiff refers to her work as sound ‘installations’ rather thansound ‘art’, a designation that underscores her interest in therelationship of the perceiver’s body to the work. This specificationnotwithstanding, Cardiff’s output is routinely mentioned ininventories of sound art.

Field Recording, Sound Art and Objecthood 43

simultaneously approaching and receding, as if appre-hended in an infinite perspective [y]. (Fried 1967: 167;

his emphasis)

That is, minimalist art asserts itself physically suchthat the observer is forced to contend with it as acorporeal presence rather than as simply an art workremoved from the sphere of the observer (Davis 2003:208–10). In other words, the boundaries between theart work and the outside world are breached. Friedcontrasts minimalism’s presence with modernism’s‘presentness’, which for him is inherently better because‘at every moment the work itself is wholly manifest’(Fried 1967: 167; his emphasis). A work that exhibitspresentness is instantaneously manifest, while a workthat lacks presentness requires that the observer absorbit from different perspectives over time. Presentnesstakes the beholder out of the work, while presencenecessitates the physical presence of the beholder.

Admittedly, both presentness and presence wouldbe elusive for any recorded work, the former becauserecordings unfold over time and thus cannot beapprehended in a single moment, the latter becausethe listener is aware that he or she can never truly be inthe presence of the event because it has already hap-pened in the past. Nonetheless, Tsunoda’s and Lopez’sexplanations of their field recordings resonate with thisidea of presence, and thus suggest an alternative modeof site specificity. As stated above, Tsunoda distin-guishes between the ideal of objective perception (anideal because it is, unrealistically, the same for every-one) and the lived experience of perception, whichentails an awareness of the listener’s body in relation tosounds. Because Tsunoda’s recordings capture soundsthat are often so unusual and that require unusualmicrophone placement, they draw heightened atten-tion to the placement of the listener’s body in relationto the sounds. ‘Curved Pipe’ (Scenery of Decalco-mania), for instance, contains drones captured near theopening of a pipe. The track encourages the listener toimagine hearing these same sounds directly, even if thiswould require the impossible situation of fitting intoa pipe. Lopez’s appeals for reduced listening alsodownplay the importance of objective knowledgeabout sounds in favour of an undetermined, individualengagement with sounds as standalone objects. Thetextures of his sounds in La Selva, for instance, are sorich and multilevelled, from close-by frogs to distantbirds, that the listener has a strong sense of the breadthof the sonic environment. So even when the listenercan successfully disregard the origins of sounds, theirplacement within the stereophonic field conveys thesense of a large, voluminous space into which thelistener’s body has been placed. Thus while theserecordings are in reality mobile and untethered, theyintimate that the listener is in a specific location inclose proximity to the sounds.

3. CONCLUSION

In this article, I have emphasised the intended effects ofreduced listening and objecthood. Tsunoda and Lopezmay strive for non-referential art, but this certainlydoes not mean that they succeed in that effort.Reduced listening and objecthood are embedded inculture and history, particularly the discourses con-cerning phenomenology, so any claims that thesepractices stand outside of history or signification arethemselves socially significant and thus warrant criticalreflection. This having been said, one justification foradopting objecthood as an analytic tool is thatobjecthood is also discernable in other strains of con-temporary electronic music. Many electronica artistsfeel that the sounds they employ do not (or should not)convey meaning as conventional musical materials do.For example, the statements of some microsoundartists suggest that they regard their sounds more asbasic materials than as musically significant units.Richard Chartier, a sound artist and co-founder of theLINE subsidiary of the label 12k, says:

The advent of digital audio has greatly increased what

composers can do in terms of using the aspect of silenceas a compositional element. Where it really is silent, notan analog silence that has that hiss. With digital silence,

there’s nothing. An absolute zero – no code. My work isreally a process of removal. [y] That’s what I like aboutworking with sound as opposed to paint and canvas:

especially working on a computer, you can take awaysound until there’s really nothing left. (Boon 2002)

Kim Cascone writes:

Many glitch pieces reflect a stripped-down, anechoic,atomic use of sound, and they typically last from one to

three minutes. [y] This is a clear indication that con-temporary computer music has become fragmented, it iscomposed of stratified layers that intermingle and defermeaning until the listener takes an active role in the

production of meaning. (Cascone 2000: 17)

Electronic musician and music critic Philip Sherburnewrites of the glitch sounds in 12k releases:

notes, pulses, and textures bear no immediate relation tothe world around them, to a language of melody ortonal narrative, but in their careful melding of pulse and

grain [y]. (Sherburne 2002: 171)

The common thread in these statements is anattention to the material qualities of sound and silence.Chartier’s silence is not the same as the pregnantsilences in Cage’s music, full of ambient, neglectedsound, but is rather completely blank, empty space.Cascone views microsound processes as methods of‘deferring’ or deflecting meaning. Sherburne mostclearly resonates with objecthood with his statementthat sounds bear ‘no immediate relation’ to the outsideworld. For these three writers, sounds function lessas placeholders for meaning than as blank objects

44 Joanna Demers

that can be added to or removed from the texture ofa work.Conceptualisations of sound as blank, meaningless

objects are deserving of continued study, especiallysince so much of the scholarship devoted to electronicand electroacoustic music theorises the commu-nicative abilities of music and sound (Emmerson2007; Smalley 1996; Wishart 1986). While manyelectronic works clearly do work with the perceivedassociations and significance of sound, there is agrowing body of electronic works that assume anantithetical approach towards sound. Whether weagree or not that sound can defer or evade meaning,objecthood thus emerges as a means of articulatingthis desire to discard the accrued associations ofsounds, no matter how impossible this desire mightprove to be.

REFERENCES

Boon, M. 2002. 12k/Line: Zen and the Art of the DrumMachine. Wire 218.

Cascone, K. 2000. The Aesthetics of Failure: ‘Post-Digital’Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music. Computer

Music Journal 24(4): 12–18.Chion, M. 1983. Guide des objets sonores: Pierre Schaeffer

et la recherche musicale. Paris: Editions Buchet/Chastel.

Chion, M. 1990. Audio-Vision: Sound On Screen. Trans. C.Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press.

Cox, C. and Warner D. (eds.) 2004. Audio Culture:

Readings in Modern Music. New York and London:Continuum.

Davis, R. 2003. ‘yand what they do as they’re goingy’:

Sounding Space in the Work of Alvin Lucier. OrganisedSound 8(2): 205–12.

Emmerson, S. 2007. Living Electronic Music. Aldershot:Ashgate.

Fink, R. 2005. Repeating Ourselves: American MinimalMusic as Cultural Practice. Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press.

Foster, H., Krauss, R., Bois, Y.-A. and Buchloh B. 2004.Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Post-modernism. London: Thames and Hudson.

Fried, M. 1967. Art and Objecthood. In Art and Objecthood:Essays and Reviews. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1998.

Haynes, J. 2005. Cross Platform: Toshiya Tsunoda. The

Wire 252.

Hegarty, P. 2007. Noise/Music: A History. New York:Continuum.

Kane, B. 2007. L’Objet Sonore Maintenant: Pierre Schaef-fer, Sound Objects and the Phenomenological Reduc-tion. Organised Sound 12(1): 15–24.

Kwon, M. 2002. One Place After Another: Site-Specific Artand Locational Identity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

LaBelle, Brandon. 2006. Background Noise: Perspectives on

Sound Art. New York: Continuum.Licht, A. 2007. Sound Art: Beyond Music, Between Cate-

gories. New York: Rizzoli.Lopez, F. 1997. Schizophonia vs. l’objet sonore: Sound-

scapes and Artistic Freedom. http://www.franciscolopez.net/pdf/schizo.pdf

Lopez, F. 2000. Interview with Fear Drop. http://www.

franciscolopez.net/int_fear.htmlMerleau-Ponty, M. 2002. Phenomenology of Perception.

Trans. C. Smith. London and New York: Routledge.

Plop. 2007. Interview with Toshiya Tsunoda. http://www.inpartmaint.com/plop/pdis_e/plop_e_feature/toshiya_tsunoda.html

Schaeffer, P. 1966. Traite des objets musicaux: essai inter-disciplines. Paris: Editions du Seuil.

Sherburne, P. 2002. 12k: Between Two Points. OrganisedSound 7(1): 171–6.

Smalley, D. 1996. The Listening Imagination: Listening inthe Electroacoustic Era. Contemporary Music Review13(2): 77–107.

Smalley, D. 1997. Spectromorphology: Explaining SoundShapes. Organised Sound 2(2): 107–26.

Tsunoda, T. 2007. Toshiya Tsunoda. In R. Moser and

H. Friedl (eds.) Extract: Portraits of Sound Artists.Vienna: Nonvisualobjects.

Windsor, W.L. 1996. Autonomy, Mimesis and Mechanical

Reproduction in Contemporary Music. ContemporaryMusic Review 15(1): 139–50.

Wishart, T. 1986. Sound Symbols and Landscapes. InS. Emmerson (ed.) The Language of Electro-acoustic

Music. Houndmills: Macmillan.

DISCOGRAPHY

Lopez, F. 1998. La Selva. Rotterdam: V2_Archief, V228.Lopez, F. 2001. Buildings [New York]. Rotterdam:

V2_Archief, V232.

Lopez, F. 2007.Wind [Patagonia]. Seattle: and/OAR, and/27.Tsunoda, T. 2003. Scenery of Decalcomania. Melbourne:

Naturestrip, NS3003.Tsunoda, T. 2005. Ridge of Undulation. Stockholm: Hapna,

H.24.

Field Recording, Sound Art and Objecthood 45

On Sonification of Place: Psychosonographyand Urban Portrait*

DANI IOSAFAT (AKA DANI JOSS )

Seesener Str. 70f, Berlin 10709, GermanyE-mail: danijoss@yahoo.com

Urban Portrait: Thessaloniki is a sonic art installation by

this author, presented at the Lansdown Centre for Electronic

Arts of Middlesex University, London, in May 2008. This

article constitutes an exploration of sonic representation

of the experience of place as a central element of the work.

The term psychosonography is introduced to encapsulate

the described method and references to its supporting

concepts. Urban Portrait is about representation of

experienced locality, as well as the emergence of relationships

among a collection of such localities through their sonic

embodiments. Ultimately, it takes the form of the sonic

equivalent of a psychogeographical map, to be navigated

by aural means.

1. SENSE AND REPRESENTATION OF PLACE

1.1. Place/space

A variety of meanings have been attributed to theword ‘space’, as it appears in the literature of diversedisciplines and research fields. In considering thespecialised interests of this investigation, space can beregarded as a generalised set of dimensions, encom-passing objects of relative size and distance, that doesby no means imply that there exists any other kindof relationship between these objects; it is merely areference framework, or ‘the dimension of quantitativedivisibility’ (Massey 2005: 23). Should a spatiallyrelated set of objects appear to be linked by action,however, it is attributed with significance; its con-stituting objects appear to suggest utility, or any otherproperty that relates to some meaning. A bedroom’sbed, pillows, sheets and curtains are related throughthe action of sleeping, for example, and thus thebedroom space becomes place, as it has acquired apurpose. Tuan argues that ‘what begins as undiffer-entiated space becomes place as we [y] endow it withvalue’ (Tuan 1977: 6). It is possible to generalise and

assert that the quality of place is linked to activityand, as such, also encompasses time. In the words ofthe leading figure of the Situationist International,Guy Debord, places are made by ‘subjecting space toa directly experienced time’ (Debord 1995: 126 –thesis 178).

The sense of place, consequently, emerges as a resultof a more complicated interaction than mere obser-vation: It is the consideration and appreciation ofperceptual stimuli that provide this general impression,through association and other cognitive processes. Aswill be discussed later, the aesthetics and poetics ofvisual stimuli, such as the observation of architectureand landscape, can be important; so, of course, cansound. A method of representation of the sense ofplace using sound as the sole medium must, therefore,provide means of reproducing general sensations andimpressions, complete with context, memory andemotion involved as appropriate.

1.2. Psychogeography

In his ‘Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography’,Debord defines psychogeography as ‘the study of theprecise laws and specific effects of the geographicalenvironment, consciously organised or not, on theemotions and behaviour of individuals’ (Debord1955). The inverse, obviously, also holds: Situation-ism ‘presupposed that it was possible for people tosynthesise or manage these situations [which affectthe individual’s consciousness and will] as an act ofself-empowerment’ (Sadler 1998: 45–6). The rela-tionship between individuals and environment istherefore bi-directional. Psychogeography is thus theinteraction between human and space and, as such,also a study of place.

The situationists built maps (dubbed psychogeo-graphical) that ‘gave all power to subjectivity, [y]expressed insubordination and chance rather than cer-tainty’ (Merrifield 2005: 48), such as Debord and Jorn’s1957 Naked City (Sadler 1998: 60). The maps were infact collages of pieces of conventional maps inter-connected with arrows that suggested flow between, andaffinity among, places, ‘odours and tonalities of the city-scape, its unconscious rhythms and conscious melodies’(Merrifield 2005: 31), ‘[investigating] the relationship

*This article is based on my thesis for the MA Sonic Arts course ofMiddlesex University. I wish to thank Nye Parry for his guidanceand supervision; Dimitrios Adam for his advice and assistance onthe field; John Dack for his continuing support and the translationto Guide des objets sonores; Rina-Sarra and Alice Iosafat for theirassistance with graphical elements of this work; and the musiciansAngeliki Sousoura, Theodore Hytiris, Lenio Liatsou, ThanosSideris, Christos Pappas, Traianos Papadopoulos, Irene Khissaand Harry Elektron.

Organised Sound 14(1): 47–55 & 2009 Cambridge University Press. Printed in the United Kingdom. doi:10.1017/S1355771809000077

between language, narrative, cognition’ (Sadler 1998:60). The endless possibilities of navigation presented bythe arrow networks reflect the activity of derive, or drift.The latter, ‘a mode of experimental behaviour linked tothe condition of urban society’ (Merrifield 2005: 30),was the process of walking around cities guided bypsychogeographical criteria and documenting humanactivity and its impact upon places. The maps wouldoften give way to subjectivity to a surreal extent, as wasthe case with Constant’s cityscapes, ‘redolent passage-ways, shocking landscapes, superimposing routes andspaces onto each other’ (Merrifield 2005: 51). In thesecases, the maps would function as representations ofimaginary landscapes,1 visions with no immediateequivalent to actual geography. These maps, due totheir close relationship with the derive, may providea promising representational model for this project.

1.3. Impression/expression

The relationship between sound and vision isstrong but delicate. One hints at the other in constantfashion, contributing to our environmental under-standing. It is not uncommon for the two to notconcur in a singular impression. An obvious cause forthis disjunction of the senses is sound’s ubiquitouspresence: sounds cannot be ignored directionally inthe way that sight can be directed in space. Further-more, a dream, or an expression, of a site might havea variety of sounds associated with it: evoked frommaterials, apparent spatial features such as distanceand size, even sonority from objects that appearcapable of producing sound. Inversely, a sonic sti-mulus can evoke the impression of an associated visualimage.

An image (not necessarily visual) that possessessuch evocative qualities can be said to be poetic, in theAristotelian sense. Bachelard remarks that:

[the poetic image] is referable to a direct ontology. [y It]has an entity and dynamism of its own. [y] The relationof a new poetic image to an archetype is not a causalone. (Bachelard 1964: xvi)

Therefore, an object’s image is a being in its ownright, a separate entity from the object’s materialexistence, and disjunct from all causality related tothe nature of the phenomenon. It is possible to con-sider this image (or general reconstruction, in thesense discussed) as completely remote from the realityfrom which it originates. Bachelard argues that aninterpretation of such an image should not beattempted, as doing so will cause it to be ‘[translated]into a language that is different from the poetic logos’(Bachelard 1964: xxiv).

The experience of imagery can thus be brokendown into two stages:

(i) Impression: the reception of the stimulus and thesubjective reconstruction of a poetic image,complete with any mental transformations aspreviously discussed. The image is appreciatedand a primary sensation is established, such asaffect, allure, resentment, intrigue or otherwise.

(ii) Expression: The image is formed into an experi-ence that can be described and represented.

It is our hypothesis that evocation takes place in thevery early impression stage, followed by the effectsof consciousness, while context and association occurlater to form the expressive image.

1.4. The psychosonographic

What is hereby attempted is a sonic representation ofplace as an expression of a mental image, which is aresult of sensory experience and is causally unrelatedto spatial materiality. Psychogeography, its mapsand the derive lend themselves well to this end. Theresulting representation will therefore be a product ofdrift, the determinants of which are:

alterations in emotional and ambient ‘intensity’; ‘theappealing or repelling character of certain places’; and

the drifter’s tendency to ‘drain’ along relatively unre-sistant paths, the ‘fissures in the urban network’. (Sadler1998: 90)

It can be asserted that the general form of this projectis the sonic equivalent of a psychogeographical map.What is sought are the ‘fissures’ between places thatare uncovered through the process of impression andexpression, disregarding any geographical proximity.Psychosonography is introduced to encapsulate thisprocess, while a realisation of this type of sonic map(i.e., a psychosonographic representation) will hence-forward be referred to as a portrait.

Consequently, there exist two varieties of psycho-sonographic drift: the actual, equivalent to thesituationist practice, during which recordings maytake place, and the virtual, which is a result of using apsychosonographical map, a purely mental process.The drifters are different persons: the recordist andthe wanderer, the author and the character of anarrative, the designer and the user of a map.

The use of location recordings may suggest a simi-larity to soundscape composition. The latter, however,deems ‘the acoustic ecology arena as the basis fromwhich [it] emerges’ (Westerkamp 2002: 52), and, assuch, serves a completely different purpose. It is rea-sonable to suggest that soundscape composition is topsychosonography what photography is to expression-ism: the Brucke artists, for example, ‘tried to capturetheir sensory experiences and visual impressions [y] inthe form of paintings’ (Elger 2007: 12). Also, Wassily

1In Wishart’s terms, this is an imaginary landscape of the type ‘real-objects/unreal-space’ (Wishart 1996: 146).

48 Dani Iosafat

Kandinsky, co-editor of the original Blaue Reiter pub-lication, in his ‘Concerning the Spiritual in Art’, wroteof ‘artistic recreation of mood in its inner value’(Kandinsky 1914 – also cited in Kahn 1999: 107).Psychosonography and expressionism share an attitudetoward representation of material reality: impressionsand experiences are rendered directly, with a referentialand not interpretative perspective on the actual natureof the cosmos, with a focus on the subject of observa-tion; they make use of the ‘poetic logos’.

2. SONIFICATION

2.1. Materials

As previously mentioned, location recordings collectedthrough the drift process are the first sounds availablefor the representation of place; they are, in effect,records of reality and provide a frame of reference inthe ecological domain. In Debord’s words, ‘ecologicalscience [y] provides psychogeography with abundantdata’ (Sadler 1998: 84), and therefore the soundscaperecording functions like a secondary derive, as a sourceof data for closer examination. Furthermore, it hasbeen argued that impression, this investigation’s per-ceptual model, encompasses evocation and the pro-duction of poetic imagery. Thus, these effects, alongwith an accounting for the totality of human senses,must also be considered in expression. A basic mani-pulation of the location recordings consists of filtering,superimposition and juxtaposition, which allows forhandling of time and density, in a manner similar toFerrari’s ‘concentration’ and ‘condensation’ effects inPresque rien no.1 (Wishart 1986: 51).Location sound alone does not suffice for satisfac-

tory psychosonographical representation. There existsa need for sonority that can adequately satisfy theexpressive conditions set forth. Musical instruments areparticularly suitable for such a task: They are generallyintrinsically recognisable2 sound sources, but theiridentification can be masked with appropriate treat-ment, thus appearing capable of ambiguous states ofsource recognition, a central theme of this investigationthat will be further analysed. Most importantly, theiruse involves human agents (instrumentalists), whoseproficiency in expressing themselves with sound as wellas in producing a good variety of sonorities can beleveraged. This introduces third-party interpretationsof features of place, an interesting experiment in itsown right. Additionally, real-world sound objects (ofthe kind associated with musique concrete) that are notpresent on location can be used; these can be foundelsewhere or constructed in the studio to specification.

Instruments and concrete sounds are useful both inaugmenting the sense of place in general, as discussed,and in aiding the identification of features of placealready present in the location recording. Chion notesthat sounds are recognised to be ‘truthful, effective andfitting not so much if they reproduce what would beheard [y] in reality, but if they render (convey,express) the feelings associated with the situation’(Chion 1994: 109).

2.2. Mimesis and imagery

In order to use the portion of this vocabulary thatdoes not originate from the location under descrip-tion, as explained above, it is necessary to discuss theparticular aspects of the intended mimetic discourse.Emmerson uses the term ‘mimesis’ to ‘denote theimitation not only of nature but also of aspects ofhuman culture not usually associated directly withmusical material’ (Emmerson 1986: 17), a particularlyapplicable definition for our purposes. He also spe-cifies two types of mimesis: ‘timbral’ and ‘syntactic’(Emmerson 1986: 17–18). The simplest form ofmimesis can use both at the same time, an instancefrequently encountered in instrumental music: aninstrument attempts a direct imitation of a naturalfeature (a flute imitating birdsong, for example, relieson both timbral similarity and its ability to approx-imate gestural content). This is another reason for thechoice of instruments, in that they offer vast potentialof gestural control. Smalley considers instrumentalgestures as ‘stand-ins for non-musical gestures’ in‘first order surrogacy’ (Smalley 1986: 82).

It is important to clarify that this is a particular use ofthe term mimesis, which is also traditionally associatedwith resemblance (as noted in Halliwell 2002: 15): itdoes not necessarily imply the process of imitating butthe relationship of the represented to its original. Platois concerned with the representation of essence (oysi�a):In his Republic, he argues that the existence of an objectis twofold: it exists materially and as a concept (idea3 –Plato 1992: 104, p. 596b) that represents philosophicaltruth and is, in effect, an archetype. A craftsman cancreate an object by considering this concept, but cannotcraft the concept itself. A painter, in a similar fashion,can also create the same object through representation,but cannot be credited as the object’s creator (Plato1992: 597e–113). In short, Plato suggests that a repre-sentation is an imitation of matter (appearance –jainomenon), which is an imitation of truth (being –on) (Plato 1992: 598b–113), and therefore is removed

2Wishart differentiates between ‘intrinsic’ and ‘contextual’ recog-nition in Wishart 1996: 150. In the case of instruments, thishappens primarily as a result of musical listening experience.

3This word is literally translated as ‘idea’. It refers to a mentalarchetype and there can only be one for each material object. ForPlato, the ideal form exists in concept and is the only truth aboutthe object. His material and mental universes is a common themethroughout his work and originates from Pythagorean thought(Halliwell 2002: 15).

On Sonification of Place 49

from essence – an imitation of the second order. Plato’sargument also poses a requirement for the representorto possess some knowledge4 about the particularrepresentation, and not merely mimetic skill. Theprocess of the derive addresses this condition in part.It becomes necessary to consider the nature of theimagery we are hereby attempting to create.

We are enforcing a restriction to the senses: weonly represent place with sound. We have establishedthat a direct, phonographic mimetic approach of thefirst order does not suffice; its reality cannot be inaccordance with the essence of its source (the philo-sophical truth). Thus, we are in need of an additionallayer of discourse, in order not to represent, but toreconstruct the experienced reality that we seek toportray with respect to the aforementioned essence, anecessity that we have already catered for by con-sidering the use of musical instruments, as well asother arbitrary sounds. By presenting a variety ofcues for the missing stimuli (related to senses otherthan hearing, or even sounds that can not be capturedor do not exist) and characteristics of place that arenot directly linked to human senses but are results ofexperience, this new reality does not seek to contrastthe original one, but to blur the distinction betweenthem (within the space-time of the artistic product) byapproaching the archetypal, the general form, thephilosophical truth. The latter is approached throughabstraction: By transforming (in time or in stasis) aphonographic image into one that does not fit the ori-ginal context (in Wishart’s terms, creating an imaginarylandscape of the type real-objects/unreal-space (Wishart1996: 146) – in a similar way to psychogeographicalmaps as discussed in 1.2), we are predisposing thelistener to perceive their common attributes, therebyasserting that we portray an aspect of place that doesnot depend upon its materiality. The effect of combin-ing (sequentially, simultaneously, or in a temporallyremote manner through memory) this expression withevidence of material reality creates an ambiguous state,a model of some heightened perception that can occurin what Baudrillard dubs the hyperreal, ‘sheltered [y]from any distinction between the real and the imagin-ary’ (Baudrillard 1994: 3). Mimesis, in this context,becomes simulation, a process of imitation that ‘threa-tens the difference between the ‘‘true’’ and the ‘‘false’’ ’(Baudrillard 1994: 2).

Furthermore, it is stressed that, in applying theabove rationale, the subject of expression is the deriveitself, not its records (in the form of audio recordingsor otherwise). Were it not so, it would appear that sucha representation would be a Platonic imitation of thethird order, even further away from philosophical

truth. However, in practising a process of selection ofattributes of place by experiential criteria and inportraying them, stripping ornamental references totheir materiality and context, we are approachingtheir original form5 and thus arriving at an image,with severed causal bonds to its origin, that is a beingon its own and, according to our previous statements,is of a poetic nature. The analogies among these levelsof mimesis are reflected in figure 1. Although theimaginary originates from an imitation of reality, it iscloser to an archetypal form through abstraction. Theside view is the perspective of the hyperreal: realityand imagination are indistinguishable.

2.3. Composition

Since it is required that a sound exhibits a certainattribute that relates to an object’s formal origins (itsessence), it follows that it must either be processed inorder to acquire this attribute or possess it to beginwith. Most DSP-related transformation processes,however, tend to distort the sound’s landscape – its‘imagined source’ (Wishart 1986: 44) – towards theunreal. It will be difficult to establish mimetic dis-course, as discussed, in this way, because this attri-bute will appear to originate from an unidentifiablesource and will not lend itself to the image we areattempting to establish; it will be, in this respect,alien. On the other hand, in the event that a soundpossesses this attribute by virtue of timbral or ges-tural characteristic, it needs no major transforma-tional process and can be used directly. In this case,the sound retains its original landscape, which, in thecase of an offsite sound, will be different to thelandscape of the portrayed place by definition and,in conjunction with a reality reference, an imaginarylandscape of the type real-objects/unreal-space isestablished, analogous to the psychogeographicalmaps as argued in 1.2. In this case, as there appears tobe no particular reason for the object’s presence inthe portrayed image, mimetic discourse is arguably

Archetype / meaning

Material reality

Imitation of material reality

simulation by abstraction

hyperrealviewpoint

Figure 1. Mimetic relationships.

4This knowledge is a common conception of that era and is con-stituted of divine inspiration, aesthetic awareness and insight (Plato1992: 204), the latter being the particular issue with this argument.

5Kandinsky referred to virtually the same distinction, dismissing‘external imitation of nature’ and favouring ‘artistic recreation ofmood in its inner value’ (Kandinsky 1914; cited by Kahn 1999:107).

50 Dani Iosafat

easier to be perceived. As an example, we can considerWishart’s transformation of the word ‘Liss-’ (from‘listen’) to birdsong from his Red Bird (Wishart 1996:156–7), which is clearly only possible because of thetimbral similarity between sibilance and the formantsof the voices of the birds. That is, the sounds share amorphological thematic link (Parry 2000: 45); the ima-ginary landscape of the combined sounds is that of avoice imitating birdsong with an imaginary degreeof accuracy. The temporally inverse transformationwould suggest a bird that can imitate talking.In a similar manner, we may accomplish a rudi-

mentary transformation by masking the sound with theactual soundscape and gradually aiding the recognitionof its original source. This provides a time-domaincompositional axis: source recognition. It becomesstraightforward to assert that, in such a continuum,there exist ambiguous states where the initial referenceframe appears altered but the cause of this alterationis not apparent. In this case, when the source revealsitself, the ambiguous state is resolved, in a mannersimilar to a cadence. The precise point of identificationcan be seen as a pivot, around which the particulars ofour mimetic discourse revolve. Parry proposes the term‘mimetic value’ to describe the ‘position of a sound onthe axis of source recognition’, derived from TenHoopen’s ‘specific/surrogate’ continuum (Parry 2000:49–50), a proposition we shall adopt. Figure 2 depictsthis relationship between the mimetic value of an off-site sound object and the ambiguity that results byjuxtaposition with location sound, resulting in thedefinition of a composition space (the enclosed areaplus the linear section to the right, where ambiguity isresolved). It must be stressed that ambiguity refers tothe resulting state, rather than the sound in questionitself. Likewise, mimetic value is a property thatdepends on the morphological relationship between thesound it refers to and any other sounds involved inthe particular state. The pivot can be seen as a point onthe recognition axis, relative to this relationship, andcan occur at any time. More importantly, it needs to becrossed from left to right – mimetic value needs to beincreasing. Otherwise, memory prohibits ambiguityfrom ever occurring, as the object will have beenalready identified. Mimetic value, once it increases

past the pivot of recognition, cannot decrease againunder normal circumstances. Such ‘reverse’ move-ment can, however, be employed, as the thematiclinks will be intact.

There exists a special case: if the pivot of identifi-cation happens to indicate a very low mimetic value,it is conceivable that a sound might cross it during itsvery early attack phase – this is particularly applicableto musical instruments that, masking effects aside,are intrinsically recognisable and, as such, exhibit anormally high mimetic value. In such cases, ambiguityoccurs only during those initial milliseconds of thesound’s life. In 1.3, we stated that evocation takes placein the very early impression stage that we associatedwith first reception of stimuli and what Bachelardrefers to as onset, and plays an important part in theestablishment of the poetic image. Assuming that ourexpression is perceived by a listener, who is therefore inimpression, this miniscule attack phase is enough toestablish an image. This is the reason that certainsounds, although clearly identifiable as alien to theportrayed location, sound as they are somehow a partof it: it is still possible for the onset of the sound tohave a thematic link to an object that either is presentin the environment or has some potential to be so. Forexample, although an overblown pan flute (to theextent that it produces harmonics) can under no cir-cumstances be mistaken for a train whistle, they sharethe characteristic of the overblown pipe and, as a result,the abstract quality of the steam engine – ‘train-ness’ –can be consciously or otherwise evoked. Another wayto regard this relationship would be as a thematic linkof the second order: the flute shares a morphologic linkwith a train whistle, albeit only at the very early stages(which is apparently long enough for the link to form),and the train whistle, an intermediate stage which isnever heard in the process, shares a mimetic link6 witha train’s steam engine. Arguably, the resulting sign7

‘pan flute/steam engine’ is more suitable than an actual

ambiguity

max

min

mimetic value maxmin

pivot axis(relative to reference frame)

compositionspace

resolvedambiguity

Figure 2. Mimetic value and resulting state ambiguity.

6A link that relates to the sound’s origins.7Saussure details the nature of a sign as a signal/signification pairin Saussure 1983: 67. Using Peirce’s terminology (Peirce 1955:104–15), this is a sort of dual sign: the pan flute signifies a trainwhistle (an icon, because of their morphological relationship),which signifies a train (an index, as explained above).

On Sonification of Place 51

(modern) train signal in conveying a sense of place. Thelatter is not reminiscent of a train at all: it is designed tosignify a general warning. In other words, such sonicsigns can signify any concept we wish to express thatrelates with our subjective experience of place, as longas their signifiers can operate within our proposedframework. This is one of the mimetic schemes used forThessaloniki’s railway station in Urban Portrait.

As another example, in our portraiture of Thessa-loniki’s seaside, we have used flute sounds to imitatewind, while exploiting their sonic affinity with clar-inet multiphonics that are meant to embody thepoetic representation of distant ships. The association‘clarinet/ship image’ is formed by a subjective inter-pretation of general impressions such as weight onwater, rust, and slow motion. What is conveyed is notthe abstract notion of the ship, but the expression ofa personal experience of one when viewed from acertain place and under certain conditions of obser-vation. Strictly speaking, this is not a sign, as thereexists no definitive relationship between signifier andsignified. Once, however, we remove the objectivenotion of the ‘ship’ and consider the immaterialsensation that results from its sighting, we may speakof a sign of the general form ‘signifier/poetic image’.While this proposition does not make linguistic sense,it allows for a subjective resolution of the relationbetween the sonic expression and the image, thusenabling abstraction from immaterial stimuli.

2.4. Place sounding

In attempting to solidify a method of sonification, weassert that mimesis, as discussed in 2.2 and applied in2.3, is our primary tool. The subject of our expressionis our impression of the places we are attemptingto express, as established during the drifting processand experience. The object of expression is anotherimpression, one coming from an imaginary derive,undertaken by a fictional character that we expectour listener to identify with: our expression resemblesstorytelling, other than the fact that we are concernedwith imagery rather than narration. To this end, wecan use mimesis to highlight our experience of place,using a record of it (in soundscape recordings) thatcan be enhanced, effectively populating the sonicexpression with: (i) objects that exist in space, theimpression of the existence of which we wish tohighlight by elevating the perceptual importance ofthe features that approach the objects’ form; (ii)objects that exist in space but produce virtually nosound, or objects that do not exist at all, by pre-senting a surrogate structure that functions in asimilar way; (iii) sonic signs that associate with afeature of place or its poetic impression that cannotbe captured by recording, due to a silent nature orimmateriality; and (iv) abstract sonority related to

mood and ambience, by employing sonic forms thatwe believe to evoke a poetic image similar to the onewe wish to express.

3. PROJECT DEVELOPMENT

3.1. Drifting and recording

As thus far elaborated, the process of recording is thebeginning of this endeavour. What is perhaps the mostsignificant issue, other than a problematic acousticecology associated with urban environments (‘lo-fi’, touse Schafer’s terminology (Schafer 1994: 43)), is that italters human-related features of place. Like any kindof observation, it disturbs the phenomenon: peopleare reacting in one way or another to the sight of amicrophone. The primary concern was not the sonicquality of the result but the transparency of the pro-cess, in order to ensure that what is being recorded isunaffected by the presence of the recordist. Therefore,most of the field recordings were made using equip-ment as discreet as possible, such as pocket flashrecorders and miniature microphones, effectivelysacrificing definition for fidelity (see (Chion 1994: 98)for a discussion of the terms).

The drift itself, however, is of a more general import.As detailed previously, it is in this process that allsensory information is gathered in impression. Since wehave embraced subjectivity as an expressive quality,drifting, during which all impressions are formed, is apart of the project in itself. It would be rather difficultfor someone with no intimate knowledge of the cityto construct this portrait. Thus, we can assert thatexperiencing the city in psychosonographic terms iscentral to the development of the project.

3.2. Form

This incarnation of Urban Portrait is about Thessa-loniki, Greece. A total number of six places in the citythat exhibit a particular interest were selected: thedocks, the railway station, the old Modiano market,the seaside, the Upper City and the central Tsimiskiavenue. After an initial assembly, selection and edit-ing of location recordings, a number of local musi-cians were invited to a recording studio and asked toimprovise on relevant environmental features, bothbefore and after hearing the recordings. Despite ageneral guidance and a few prescribed phrases, theywere free to produce any sound they felt appropriate,as long as they did not attempt to interpret the featurein question. Therefore, the combination of locationand instrumental sound contains traces of the musi-cians’ impression and expression of place, in effectenriching the work and protecting it from accidentalbias. The result of this process was an extensivecompositional palette: bassoons and bass clarinets

52 Dani Iosafat

were used against boat horns and traffic sounds; theprepared piano proved an effective source of mechan-ical sonority; flutes and clarinets using multiphonictechniques provided an assortment of fricative orflowing textures related to various material elementsand natural phenomena; and various recorded objects,such as kitchen utensils and furniture, contributed tothe modelling of environmental aspects that areimpossible to capture with location recording, tomention but a few examples.In order to express ‘flow and affinity’ among the

portrayed places (see 1.2), a set of transitions weredefined. The latter connect the senses of placethrough elements of their expressive forms, withoutnecessarily demanding any kind of geographicalequivalence or proximity, as we have already stated inintroducing psychosonography (1.4). Transitions arenot an ornamental feature of this project: place canbe important not so much because of its existence,but because of its relationship with other places. Tofacilitate a transitioning scheme, each place is frag-mented into scenes that revolve around a particulartheme. For example, the general location of the city’sdocks is divided into ‘far view’, ‘ships’ and ‘machinery’.Different aspects of experience of place are divided intodifferent scenes, each of which presents two possibledestinations: one related to another scene of the sameplace, which is the default, and a second, optionaltransition that links the present place to anotherthrough some expressive similarity of their respectivescenes. Since we wish for the listener to be able tointeract with the piece by enabling him or her toinstruct a transition, the adoption of this schemeeffectively circumvents the problem of defining transi-tions with a many-to-many relationship by reducing itto a set of simpler problems.It becomes difficult to describe the individual ren-

ditions of places in a general way, as each presentsdifferent challenges and necessitates a unique adap-tation of method. As an example, a scene of theempty market building is populated by either sales-men or travellers, in which case it is transformed intothe railway terminal. In another instance, the folkmusic inside a traditional Upper City tavern is usedto transition to the street, through the recording of abusker and a musician imitating his style. Ambiguousstates are also exploited, as they can be resolved intoabstract space that can then be gradually con-textualised. Such an example would be the sound of atrain stopping on the platform, which resolves aprevious complicated interplay among sounds oftrain tracks, a snare drum roll and clarinet pad taps.The latter then, through layering and digital proces-sing, appear to densify and eventually transform torain, thus preparing the ground for a stormy seasidescene. In the case of transitioning between two scenesthat belong to the same place, the task becomes

significantly simpler, as there exists no need for anintermediate state.

3.3. Installation

The installation is based on a computer runningMax/MSP (Cycling ’74/IRCAM). The employedquadrophonic diffusion system provides ample spacefor the coexistence of the multitude of sounds thatmust be heard in simultaneity, greatly diminishing theneed for additional filtering and significantly improv-ing the usable dynamic range. The human/machineinterface consists of a button that can alert the lis-tener to the possibility of a transition by blinking alight-emitting diode on its base, with a subsequentpress executing the transition. A display providesinformation on the place currently being diffused; itis placed in the centre of the room, along with thebutton.

In outlining the project’s form, we have attributedtwo possible transitions to a scene, dubbed ‘default’ and‘optional’, with the apparent intention to provide thelistener with a choice. This interaction materialises intwo steps: the listener is informed that there exists anoptional destination, which is obviously related to asonic element appearing at about that moment thatcarries a hint about what the destination might be; then,for a pre-determined amount of time, the user has theoption to instruct that transition, or eventually progressto the next default scene. This is loosely modelled afterthe derive practice, where navigation ultimately dependson the drifter’s perception of environmental features.However, the importance of the – limited – interactiveaspect of the work can be overestimated by the user, asa result of the interface presented to him: it is a com-mon expectation for a press of a button to bring aboutsome perceptible change. In contrast, the installation’sbutton is inactive most of the time and, even when it isnot, the change it incurs is gradual and often beginsseveral seconds into the future. This is a condition thatlimits the comprehensibility of the artwork and pre-scribes the use of operating instructions. To an extent, italso conceals the fact that this is primarily a listeningpiece and not interactive art as such. To counteract theproblem, visual elements have been kept at a minimum,in an attempt to direct attention to sound as much aspossible. During the piece’s presentation, it becameapparent that providing seating would also encouragelisteners to stay longer (the latter is important assome of the scenes are several minutes long). Further-more, the use of statistical data of users’ transitionchoices was carefully considered. Indeed, they are pro-cessed and stored in a transition probability table, bututilisation of the latter was ruled out because, as withany statistical system, meaning only emerges given asufficient volume of data, which in turn would neces-sitate a large-scale, long-term exhibition of the piece.

On Sonification of Place 53

4. CONCLUSIONS

Throughout this document, an analogy of the psy-chosonographic portrait to the psychogeographicalmap has been asserted. A fundamental differenceremains: the two, despite the similarities in theircompositional processes, manifest themselves in acompletely different way, with respect to form andfunction. We must thus refine: the portrait is neitherthe diffusion system, nor the sound that is diffusedthrough it, but a mental image. Its material aspect isan immersive hub, an actual structure that can beused to convey virtual locale. It is not, strictlyspeaking, a virtual environment either, as the listeneris not free to navigate it, but is bound to pre-determined options. The phrase ‘expressionist soundsculpture’ lends itself better. The process of experi-ence while in the domain of the artwork can be saidto be similar to listening to a story without a narra-tive, the resulting effect of image evocation compris-ing the analogy in this case, as in the case of Blake’sLondon, in which Blake’s ‘superimposition of hispeculiar worldview upon the geography of London’sstreets creates strange juxtapositions between familiarnames and locations and visions of a transcendentcity’ (Coverley 2006: 41). There lies the parallel withsituationist practice: an initial drift is used to artisti-cally express a second one (as detailed in 2.4), whichis constructed in such a way that it has the potentialto evoke imagery. The common element of the twootherwise separate drifts is that both occur in thesame place, in its abstract sense. This is, in fact, theanswer to the question that LaBelle asks in relationto Westerkamp’s work A Walk Through The City8

(1981): ‘In what way does such sonicity serve theactuality of the work’s drive to show us somethingabout the city?’ (LaBelle 2006: 206).

The title to this article is comprised of three ele-ments: sonification of place, psychosonography andUrban Portrait, arranged in a title/subtitle scheme.Upon inspection of the presented scrutiny of the con-cepts involved, it becomes apparent that any one couldassume the position of the main title. The nature ofthis investigation is threefold: it exists as a sonic artinstallation, in the material aspect of Urban Portrait; asa creative process, in psychosonography, hereby per-ceived as an interaction with one’s environment, withits outcomes considered evidence of an experiential andperformative endeavour; or as a method of sonification,in transforming impression to expression, with theinstallation becoming an example.

In a way, all three approaches are equally valid,different facets of the same object. Considering theorigin of this project as an enquiry into these areas,

its existence has oscillated between these approachesthroughout its lifetime. There is little need to define itmore precisely: such an assertion would deprive it ofits dimensionality, akin to a projection, which, asargued, would be a mimesis of its original form anddistanced from its inner truth.

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On Sonification of Place 55

Sound Art as Sonification, and the ArtisticTreatment of Features in our Surroundings

CLAUDIA TITTEL

Geschwister-Scholl-Str. 30, 14548 Schwielowsee OTCaputh, GermanyE-mail: claudiatittel@freenet.de

The article tries to explain different aspects of sound art in

public space in the context of an understanding of a modified

language of twentieth-century visual art and music. It gives a

description of different approaches to colouring situations and

contexts with sound. Various examples of sonification and

artistic treatments in our surrounding are shown. It shows an

artistic practice which is linked to social-cultural aspects and

their critical role in art. Therefore sound installations are

placed into a genealogy of installation practice in public space.

1. INTRODUCTION

North Adams, Massachusetts, 18 August 1997:MASS MoCA rang its bells and opened its doors tothe public with an open house celebrating the newlycompleted restoration of its historic clock tower,which had come alive for the first time in twelveyears. A clock that had set the rhythm of daily life forworkers in a nineteenth-century mill came to life withan interactive sound installation by German artistChristina Kubisch. Kubisch’s installation was asubtle piece that was more heard than seen. In sig-nalling the time of day, the clock tower’s bells chan-ged their tone and pattern in relation to the quality ofdaylight. A band of reflective solar panels surroundedthe tower, functioning as a sunlight sensor, triggeredand combined pre-recorded sounds into mini-com-positions. The digitally sampled sounds were cap-tured a few months earlier during a live jam sessionon the two original 1883 bells. The sound of each bellwas unique, but during a live jam session Kubischplayed them with different instruments such asdrumsticks, and with her hands, so that she recordeddifferent sounds. These sounds were constantlyreprogrammed by a computer. The bell soundspealed from speakers in the tower at noon, at 5 p.m.,or on special occasions. The clock tower itself wasrestored as part of Kubisch’s project, and those whodrove by the complex at night saw that she hadtreated the faces of the tower’s glass clock with whitephosphorescent pigment, illuminated from withinby ultraviolet light, so that they glowed softly in thedark. ‘I wanted the project to give the people ofNorth Adams something special, something parti-cular to the place where they live,’ Kubisch said.

‘I knew that Sprague Electric Company, the site’sprevious owner, was forced to close because thetechnology had changed, and now, by exploiting newtechnologies, an important sound feature of their cityis alive again – but in a new way.’

Working with sound engineer Manfred Fox,Kubisch recorded 50 different sounds from the ori-ginal bells. These sounds could be heard everyquarter of an hour from speakers positioned in fourdirections. In the past these bells accompanied thefactory workers, giving them the rhythm of theirpiecework depending on the time of day they worked.The sound installation reminds those who hear it ofthe difficult working conditions in the factory. Itsstarting point was the historical acoustical ambience,which no longer exists. Kubisch tried to recreatethis historical situation with her sound installation.Working with Fox she developed a sophisticatedcomputer program based on the changing daylightthat beamed the recorded bell sounds into the air.Five minutes before the bells would ring, light sensorssent signals to the computer, which calculated thedata and chose the sounds via Fox’s software. Vary-ing light conditions would generate different sounddiffusions and various sound colours. The volumeand sequence of the sounds varied across a spectrum,with cloudy days conveying bass tones and bright sungenerating higher pitches and strong chimes. Thelistener was able to distinguish the quality of lightacoustically, experiencing the light atmosphere byhearing the sounds. At sunrise people could hear thebells. At night, after dusk, the sounds disappeared.But when the sounds faded away the phosphorescentclock faces began to glow and the audible artworkbecame visual.

Christina Kubisch’s Clocktower Project is a goodexample of an aesthetic practice that is symptomaticof sound installations and the sonification of theirsurroundings. This audio-visual installation wasconcretely related to its spatial environment. Theartist paid attention to the place’s historical situationand evoked it with sensual employment of acousticalsigns. When she reactivated the bells she also rea-wakened the symbolic function of the tower in a newand different way, giving them both another identity.

Organised Sound 14(1): 57–64 & 2009 Cambridge University Press. Printed in the United Kingdom. doi:10.1017/S1355771809000089

Kubisch’s sound work gave the tower a new meaningand importance for the people of North Adams, andshe reflected the traditional social-cultural role of theacoustical situation. Through this acoustical artistictreatment Kubisch also tried to make people aware ofthe site’s atmosphere and its historical dimension. Shewanted to recreate a real situation through using anartificial world to remind us of the social and eco-nomic history of the place. Kubisch’s sound instal-lation offered a transitory and situational experienceof time and space. In this sense the artist referred tothe site as ‘treasure of memory’. The audio-visualsigns aim to link the past with the present. Throughthe visual and acoustical treatment of the installationand the recipient’s own make-up, the installationconnects to history, which is related to the contextand the aesthetic environment.

2. SITE-SPECIFICITY AND SOCIAL-

CULTURAL TREATMENT

The most important aspect of this sound installationwas its site-specificity, which is exemplary for soundinstallations in public spaces in general.

2.1. Site-specificity

Sound installations are usually site-specific artworks.A site-specific artwork is inextricably linked to itslocale: the parts relate to the larger space. As MarkRosenthal points out:

Indeed, the site-specific artist will have spent consider-able time exploring the location of the work, hence, an

analysis of the composition of a site-specific installationmust include its locale, because it derives its very formand perhaps physical substance, too, as well as its

meaning, from the context. Moving it is impossible,since the work cannot be understood or seen except inrelation to the place. The viewer witnesses a dialogue, asit were, between the artist and the space. (Rosenthal

2003: 38)

Particularly with regard to artworks in public space,the context is very important for the artwork itself. Inpublic space the artwork is not isolated, it isn’texhibited in a white cube, a museum or any otherinstitution. It can’t walk from one exhibition to thenext. It is significantly connected to the site on whichit is standing. But this locale also isn’t static, neutralor without history. These places are, rather, dynamic,mobile and significant, with many social, historical,geographical, psychological or other contexts. There-fore the determining factor of an artwork is relatedto the sites and their characteristics. Not only isthe artwork defined by its spatial, visual, acoustic,symbolic and other circumstances, the artwork alsodefines the site. The space or locale surrounding theartwork is exhibited, too. It is not only the medium of

creation and reception, but it also is clarified by theartistic concept and related to this concept as well.

2.2. Public space

Public space was, at the genesis of sound art, veryimportant to it. The question is: why was it soimportant? Sound art initially had no place in theinstitutional art system because this new genre couldnot be classified. ‘We were always hard to classify.The music field said, ‘‘that’s not music enough’’, andthe art field said, ‘‘there is too much music’’ ’(Kubisch 2000: 88) sound artist Christina Kubischremembered, and she described a general aestheticpractice shared by the first sound artists. Soundinstallations are neither fine art nor music; they existbetween genres. In fact, sound artists such as Chris-tina Kubisch wanted to escape the institutionalumbrella. ‘From the beginning, I have been interestedin spaces that were not museum spaces. The museumsand galleries were not really suitable for my worksy . I worked almost exclusively in spaces belongingto the so-called off scene or in outdoor spaces’(Kubisch 2000: 87). This was a time in which thepioneering sound artists were criticising institutions.Artists such as Max Neuhaus, Hans Peter Kuhn, RolfJulius, Bill Fontana, Bernhard Leitner or RobinMinard were looking for alternative exhibition spacesfor their art works, outside the institutional frame.With the establishment of a new multi-dimensionaland multi-media genre, there was a search for specialexhibition places. Sound installations had no place;hence, artists looked for interesting non-normativeplaces such as public spaces, stations, airports, passagesand parks; or they looked for abandoned places suchas old storage buildings, cellars, lofts, ruins, bunkers,devastated areas or abandoned industrial buildings.

3. CRITICAL IMPLICATIONS

The first sound installation, ‘Drive in Music’, wascreated in 1967 by Max Neuhaus. Not accidentally itwas installed in a public space. The idea came ‘withthe realization that most people spend a great deal oftime in their automobiles. Most of them listened tosound in their cars over the radio’, Neuhaus said(Neuhaus 1994: 18). ‘I didn’t know much about theinner workings of electronic equipment then, but Idid remember that singers sometimes used ‘‘wireless’’microphones that actually broadcast a short distanceto a radio receiver. It seemed like the ideal solution.’In Buffalo, a city with an unusually large music-loving public, on a street called Lincoln Parkway nearthe city’s main thoroughfare, he set up seven radiotransmitters, all broadcasting at the same point onthe dial, but each with a different sonority, a differentmixture of sine waves. The synthesis circuit was

58 Claudia Tittel

sensitive to weather conditions. It gradually changedthe levels in the mixture of those sine waves, creatingdifferent sonorities depending on the weather. Sincethe transmitters broadcast only a short distance,Neuhaus could shape the area covered by each soundby using an antenna wire and placing it in the shapehe wanted the sound to occupy. It solved the acces-sibility problem – a listener had to tune into the piece– and allowed a complex set of possibilities. The treesprovided a good location for mounting the trans-mitters and antennas. The piece began at the mainentrance of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and ransouth for half a mile (Neuhaus 1994: 18). Drivers onthis street who had tuned into the receiving frequencycould hear the first sound installation. The acousticalresult depended on driving speed and direction.After having worked for 14 years as a musician,

Neuhaus began to create sound works, which wereneither musical pieces nor events, and coined the term‘sound installation’ to describe them. Neuhaus wastired of being a musician: ‘I felt it had a number offlaws, the major one being the onus of entertainment,a serious burden for any art form. The visual artsseem to be free from it, while music, dance andtheatre are forced into it, at some level, by the form ofthe representation itself’ (Neuhaus 1994: 18). Startingfrom the premise that our sense of place depends onwhat we hear as well as on what we see, Neuhausutilised a given social and aural context as a foun-dation for building a new perception of place withsound. Neuhaus went on to pioneering artisticactivities outside conventional cultural contexts andbegan to create sound works anonymously in publicplaces. His first sound installation was created inkeeping with the maxim ‘music for all’. He developedhis activities in music with these networks andbroadcast works – virtual architectures which provideforums open to anyone for the development of newmusics. In the first musical piece, ‘Public Supply’(1966), he linked a radio station to a telephone net-work and created a two-way public aural space, 20miles in diameter – encompassing New York City –where any inhabitant could join a live dialogue withsound by making a phone call. The piece ‘Drive inMusic’ was the advancement of his installation‘Public Supply’.Notably, the first sound installation was created in

a public space in order ‘to make music for all’. It wasaround that time that Dan Flavin also began to usethe term ‘installation’ for his works. At the same time,many artists were leaving the institutional frame-work of museums and galleries as a protest againsttheir false neutrality and conventional art practices.In short, sound installations were instrumental to anemergent critical examination of the apparatus ofart production and distribution and its subsequentrejection.

Starting in 1968, with their Land Art projects,artists such as Walther de Maria and Michael Heizerwanted to escape the constriction of artistic activities.In 1968, after a visit to Las Vegas, Michael Heizerwent to the Mojave Desert, where he drew littleabstract figurines like ‘Compression Lines’ or ‘LoopDrawings’ or a ‘Field’ into the sand. The same year,Walther de Maria also created his work ‘The MileLong Drawing in the Desert’ as part of his ‘Walls inthe Desert’ project.1 These art works were ephemeral,only artificial traces, which were recaptured by naturein a few days, weeks or months. In the followingyears, more amazing art works were developed byHeizer and de Maria, such as the sculpture ‘DoubleNegative’ (1969–70). This big sculpture by Heizerconsists of two trenches cut into the eastern edge ofthe Mormon Mesa, northwest of Overton, Nevada.The trenches line up across a large gorge formed bythe natural shape of the mesa edge. Encompassingthis open area across the gorge, the trenches measurea total of 457 metres in length, 15.2 metres in depthand 9.1 metres in width; 218,000 tons of rock, mostlyrhyolite and sandstone, had to be removed in theconstruction of the trenches. The sheer size of‘Double Negative’ invites contemplation of the scaleof art, as well as of the spectator’s relationship to theearth and art itself. The same year, Walther de Mariaconstructed his ‘Las Vegas Piece’, which consisted oforthogonal trenches cut into the Tula Desert. Thesetwo grandiose installations, ‘Double Negative’ and‘Las Vegas Piece’, are two of the most famous pre-served earthworks. They inspired art critic RosalindE. Krauss to coin the term ‘sculpture in expandedfield’ – referring to art works in which the topo-graphy is part of the sculptural system. In addition,the creation of the surroundings implicates a trans-formation of the cultural field, which also containsthe demolishing of the boundaries of art.

In the 1970s, many artists began to evince aheightened consciousness of the ways in which insti-tutional conditions have ‘raped the context from theart’ (Kemp 1991: 90). They saw that administrativepower was always concretely linked to exhibition andgallery spaces. As soon as the boundaries of art spacewere demolished, art works could be disencumbered.The artist could also do other types of work thatwould infuse the arts with new life and pose newquestions. Many artists intended to undo the ideathat viewing art was a quasi-spiritual activity whichoccurred in a space isolated from life. Artworks inpublic space in the 1960s and 1970s can be seen as aconsequence of the artistic development of the time,as artists sought to escape from the traditional artsystem and to replace established language with

1The project, originally conceived in 1962, was to consist of twoparallel, mile-long walls. It was not realised.

Sound Art as Sonification, and the Artistic Treatment of Features in our Surroundings 59

expanded new material and an art language thatincluded life.

Gordon Matta-Clark and Daniel Buren, in parti-cular, made installations which broke down theboundaries between institutions and public space. Bysawing wall, floor and ceiling segments of a galleryspace in Antwerp, Matta-Clark collapsed not onlyphysical but also psychic boundaries. In his 1977work ‘Office Baroque’, he also presented a view of thecity. Matta-Clark wanted to liberate the autonomousand isolated artwork, and to dissolve the boundariesbetween art space and urban space. ‘The questioningwork has an obligationy to reveal the false directionof these depersonalised architectures and to makethem emerge from their false neutrality’, Buren said(Buren 1975: 206). The museum and art becameempty ideals: artists wanted to relate artworks to life,and the role of the installation was to question andto attack the traditional art system. With his work‘Within and Beyond the Frame’ (1973), Buren suc-cessfully linked the street to the gallery by placing hissignature striped sheets through a window thatopened onto West Broadway. This signature could beseen not only in the gallery space but also outdoors.Both Gordon Matta-Clark and Daniel Buren estab-lished a formal relationship between the indoor andthe outdoor environment. While defining artwork inthe context of the gallery space, Buren’s striped sheetswere not seen as artwork in urban spaces by peoplewho were not part of the art scene; to the consciousrecipient, however, the striped sheets were a referenceto the artist and his context. Buren and Matta-Clarkcriticised established art institutions and questionedthe spatial organisation of museum or gallery spaces.And it was Matta-Clark, with ‘Office Baroque’, wholiberated the artwork from the isolation of the exhi-bition space. ‘Can art get down from its pedestal andrise to street level?’ Buren asked. He wanted tocompromise the identity of the art space by allowingstreet life to enter it (Rosenthal 2003: 61).

4. NEW KINDS OF PERCEPTION

In the 1970s, the attempt to infuse art with life waslinked to new aesthetic practices aimed at reactivatingall of the senses. In real life we cannot seperate oursenses; as we are looking, we are also simultaneouslyhearing, smelling and feeling. Moreover, artistsregarded this new aesthetic inter-media practice as aunique chance for reinventing art forms. I thereforewant to argue that the quest for non-institutionalspace was linked to another intense synaestheticexperience evoked by installations and their speciallyframed spaces (Barthelmes 2000: 2–6). The centralmeaning of sound installations in public spaces is alsofound in the correlation between acoustical andvisual signs and their connection to the environment.

This has many consequences for the reception of theartwork. In sound installations there are two para-mount matters: space and time. What Mark Rosen-thal says of installation art in general can beconsidered even more so for sound installations:

The viewer is asked to investigate the work of art much as

he or she might explore some phenomenon on life,making one’s way through actual space and time in orderto gain knowledge. Just as life consists of one perception

followed by another, each a fleeting, non-linear moment,an installation courts the same dense, ephemeral experi-ence. Whereas painting and sculpture freeze time and

perhaps suggest something eternal, installation abhorssuch an effect. The viewer is in the present, experiencingtemporal flow and spatial awareness. The time and spaceof the viewer coincide with the art, with no separation or

dichotomy between the perceiver and the object.(Rosenthal 2003: 27)

Sound installations are, unlike concerts, temporallyunlimited. They are open sound works, open toacoustical ephemeral reception. The piece has neithera beginning nor an end. The musical material doesnot follow a process or development but exists in timeand space. The ‘open artwork’ is durable andephemeral at the same time. The composer does notdetermine the beginning and end of the piece; it is thelistener who defines it. These durable concerts do nottake place at the same time and in the same place asits original production but rather take place inanother time and space, in another context. Electro-nic development has freed sound artists from thetemporal constraints of live performances. Soundscan be transported. This is one of the main ideas ofsound installation: to give the audience the freedomto enter and experience the artwork at their ownleisure, to come and go, to move and to listen indi-vidually. Consequently, sound installations breakdown the typical concert hall situation. The commonreception of musical pieces became a contemplativeobservation because visitors could choose their owntimeframe. But, of course, this reception differs fromthe reception of sculptures or pictures. The staticcharacter of sculptures is dissolved; the artwork isaudible, therefore immaterial and ephemeral, whichcontradicts the concept of artistic material as eternalsign. The use of sound as artistic material opens fine artup to a temporal dimension, changing the once-distantrelationship between work and recipient and making ittransitory. Duration and temporal structure of theacoustical experience affect the visual experience.

5. INVENTING A NEW AESTHETIC PRACTICE

It is interesting to see that sound installationsappeared, along with a new aesthetic practice, at thesame time when the institutional art frame was cri-ticised by many artists such as concept or land artists.

60 Claudia Tittel

As early as the late 1970s, many artists began tothink about sound installations. Most of them werealready on the performance scene and were tired oflive performances. Artists such as Max Neuhaus,Rolf Julius, Terry Fox or Christina Kubisch were inthe performer scene but mainly because they ques-tioned the traditional art and music system. It was atthat time that many artists studied not only compo-sition or fine art but also other artistic practices. Theywere keen on creating a new aesthetic practice whichwas not linked to only one genre. Thus, many com-posers, for instance, studied electrical engineering, asChristina Kubisch did at the Technical Institute ofMilan. The goal was to achieve greater flexibility incomposition and to find new forms of sound diffu-sion. These new methods also enabled them to per-form their music independent of musicians. It reallywas an experimental time. Kubisch, for instance,developed for her first sound installation, ‘Il respirodel mare’ (Sicily 1980), her own magnetic inductionsystem. She accidentally discovered the possibility ofhearing sounds with telephone amplifiers if there wasan electro-magnetic field nearby. Then she modifiedthe amplifiers and used them for sound installations,availing herself of the characteristics of magneticfields. For ‘Il respiro del mare’, Kubisch formed alabyrinth by fixing red and blue cables to oppositewalls in a relief. In another room, she played amagnetic tape with pre-produced sound materialwhich transmitted the sound information to anamplifier and then to the wires (Bock 2001: 50). Anelectro-magnetic field emerged around the wirereliefs, and visitors could receive the sounds in thereliefs by holding small, cube-shaped amplifiers.People in the vicinity of the blue cable relief inter-cepted sounds of ocean waves, while those near thered cable received sounds of breathing. While movingbetween the two wire reliefs, the listeners could mixthe sounds to create their own compositions. Due tothe enormous success of this experiment, Kubischbegan to use this system for many other installations.The electric cables can be installed indoors or out-doors. They can follow natural forms or architecturaldetails, or can be wrapped around trees or form anindependent structure. They can be fixed on walls orceilings, or be suspended in the air.Working with an engineer, Kubisch improved

this sound apparatus until it became very complex.She designed wireless headphones with adjustabledynamic-range control and great sensitivity for theseelectro-magnetic fields, then wanted to have her ownmagnetic-induction apparatus. With this new systemit was easier to walk from one part of the installationto the next, and it really became an interesting com-posing system: the artist installed sounds, and visitorscould mix their own compositions by walking aroundthe magnetic fields. The main idea was to create

sound environments in which the visitor could findhis or her own time and moving space. The listenercould walk freely, receiving the sounds via the built-inelectro-magnetics, which function like pick-ups.Through movement or non-movement, the visitorcould choose between various sound sources and theircombinations. Recipients could, if they wanted, con-stantly mix new musical sequences with an infinitenumber of possibilities. For example, the volume ofthe sound increased as the listener moved closer to thecables. Quick movements through the space caused thesounds to fade into one another, while slow move-ments sound sequences could be heard very precisely.This was Christina Kubisch’s great discovery.

6. DISTURBANCES AS AESTHETIC

EXPERIENCES

In the 1990s, simultaneously with the technicalimprovement of the equipment, Kubisch discoveredmore and more disturbances in the headphones. Therewas an incredible increase in electro-magnetic waves incities, caused by new technologies, digital develop-ments, mobile phones, and so on, which disturbed thereception of the installed sound environments. Butthese disturbances provided interesting musical mate-rial too, and Kubisch paid attention to this. The dis-turbances were musical vibes such as rhythm, pulses orother electrical noises. This was the beginning of a newtype of work: the ‘Electrical Walks’. The artist installedthe first Electrical Walk in Cologne in 2004 as a sort oftest. On a map of Cologne, she marked all the inter-esting musical locations to help people find their wayto them. The response to this new type of work wasvery strong, and Kubisch started to develop it further.Again she designed special headphones (which she firstused in 2005) to be more sensitive to electro-magneticwaves. The sound made by electric currents is notsuppressed by the headsets; it is, in fact, magnified.

When Kubisch ‘installs’ a new Electrical Walk, shegoes into a city with her headphones, discovering theplace through concentrated listening. Then she notesinteresting musical locations on a city map. Afterseveral experiences, she remarked: ‘Every city is verypersonal. They have their individual sounds, their owncultural soundscapes.’ Kubisch has already set up morethan ten Electrical Walks in various cities, includingLondon, New York and Riga. Riga was an ‘interestingexperience’ because ‘the sounds in Riga were very EastEuropean’, she said. Using headsets and carrying a mapof the city on which a route and particularly interestingacoustical points are marked, visitors can set out toexplore acoustically its electromagnetic fields. Therange of sounds, their colours and their volume varyfrom place to place. Lighting systems, transformers,ATM machines, security systems, aerials, mobilephones, computers and many more electronic devices

Sound Art as Sonification, and the Artistic Treatment of Features in our Surroundings 61

provide a soundscape of incredible intensity. Throughthese walks Kubisch makes possible an entirely new,unknown perception of a world that had seemed sovery familiar. With the Electrical Walks she succeeds inmaking the listeners aware of a sound world that isthere but is normally inaudible. This sound world isalso continually changing as technology becomesincreasingly pervasive in our environment.

Kubisch’s sonification approach is linked to socio-cultural aspects. In many of her installations she asksthe participant to return to historical and socialinformation related to location by setting sounds inthe surrounding which had been lost. Through heracoustical treatment, Kubisch tries to make peopleaware of the site’s atmosphere and its historicaldimension.2 Her ‘Electrical Walks’ are different fromthe aesthetic practice of reinventing the historicalacoustical tradition. With these works she reflects thecontemporary (rather than historical) situation ofdifferent cities. With her ‘Electrical Walks’ she doesnot install sounds, but draws attention to an alreadyexisting but largely inaudible reality; participants arethus free to create their own electro-acoustical pieces.Kubisch’s sonification is a sort of electronic network.The recipient could walk through the city and can seeand explore it by listening intensively. In this manner,Kubisch seeks to heighten the visitor’s acousticalperception of urban electro-magnetic pollution – anapproach very much reminiscent of John Cage’sfamous definition of music: any kind of sound couldbe music, we just have to listen to it.

7. AGAINST ACOUSTICAL POLLUTION

While Christina Kubisch is inventing a new aestheticpractice by making audible inaudible acoustical signsand forming a sonic electro-magnetic map of a city,other artists such as Robin Minard are working froman ecological perspective to remove sonic pollution.

Against the background of the increase in visualand acoustical attractions in cities – as well as inacoustic radiation in public spaces such as pave-ments, restaurants and shops – a lot of sound artistswant to create conscious acoustical perception. Thisis an important starting point for sonification andartistic treatments of features in our surroundings.

‘Noise is the object of the largest number of com-plaints in the area of the environment’, Canadiansound artist Robin Minard observed (Minard 1993:13). Our sensual perception of the environment isimportant to artists, who use it in their sound works.But, particularly with regard to the continuing increaseof visual and acoustical stimuli in our surroundingsand the ubiquity of mass media, this perception is

under threat. The density of this information leads to areduction in our sensual differentiation; an increase inacoustical pollution results in a decline in our attentionto the daily acoustical phenomena in our surroundings.In this context especially, the term ‘Soundscape’,coined by R. Murray Schafer, is used. Schafer wastrying not only to describe the ensembles of soundevents in our surroundings, but also to call attentionto the acoustical situation. He also tried to relate it tothe ecological situation (Breitsameter 1996: 213).

The Futurist manifesto L’arte dei rumori (1913/1916) by the Italian Luigi Russolo included the ideaof treating all noise as music (Russolo 1919: 88). TheFuturists were fascinated by technique and by themovements of streetcars, steam-powered machinesand engines, as well as by the machine in general.They appreciated the industrial revolution as a sourceof a new kind of artistic action, whereas we nowlook more critically at these great inventions. Now,the ubiquity of visual and acoustical pollution is thesource of inspiration for many sound artists, whocreate works in which the recipients can immersethemselves in another acoustical reality. Robin Minard,for instance, wants to create art which takes theenvironment into consideration, which enters into arelationship and a dialogue with the space it occupies.One primary area of interest in his work is how todeal with acoustical space in an urban worldincreasingly polluted with noise, how to redefine theconcept of functional music in that context. Minardpoints out that the ear is rarely a factor in the plan-ning and design of architecture and urban infra-structure. He describes two strategies of ‘composingspace’ that enter into a dialogue with the architecturaland acoustical environment: conditioning andarticulation. He considers conditioning to be ana-logous to laying a mantle of colour over a space inour visual reality. Articulation refers to adding thedimension of time to architecture through the use ofsound; the movement of sound articulates and dec-orates a space. With his sound installations Minardtries to eliminate people’s physical and psychic stress.Music, which could be any kind of noise, shouldfunction to relax people and to open a new form ofperception. Minard wants to create sound environ-ments in which the listener can relax and find a silentretreat; his sound environments are places of con-centration and recreation. In his 1992 work ‘Statio-nen’ he installed different integrated microphonesand various integrated speakers for the stairwell andbell tower of Berlin’s Parochial Church. A computer-controlled MIDI system regenerated street sounds andtransmitted them into the church’s bell tower. Theroom was ‘coloured’ by vertically organised sound;the street noise was filtered and lightly reproducedin the room. Minard used the resonant frequenciesand acoustic focal points of street noise to colour and

2See the description of the Clocktower Project’ at MOCA –Introduction.

62 Claudia Tittel

articulate the space, covering the room with a newsound which blended with the natural acousticalenvironment. The listener could not really distinguishthe real sound from that deployed from the othersource. The artist uses his sound installation to cleanthe environment of acoustical pollution. As a resultsome critics declare his work to be situated somewherebetween sound design and sound art. Robin Minardwants to intervene in audible public space and tocreate an environment without acoustical pollution.

8. AWARENESS AS ARTISTIC PRACTICE OF

SOUND INSTALLATIONS

Other artists, such as Bernhard Leitner, are interestedin creating awareness of the acoustical environmentof a place. When they install sound installations, theylike to focus on the original sound space, giving it anew specificity.In 1992 Leitner, one of the pioneers of sound art,

constructed a so-called ‘Tonfeld’ in front of the IBMBuilding in Vienna. This tone field existed in a largeraster of 13 sound places in a 40360 metre area. In itsshape it resembled the architecture of the ground floorof the IBM Building. Every sound site was 1003 1003

60 cm and under the ground. In the middle of thissound site large granite columns rose to the sky. On thefront of the columns were four blue cast-iron platescovering the resonance corpus. The columns repre-sented the visual elements of the installation; theydivided and supported the sound field optically. Onthe other hand, the cast-iron plates accentuatedthe horizontal position of the sound field and gave agreat sonority to the sounds. Leitner chose echo-likesounds,reminiscent of dripping water. An amorphous-organic sound figure was formed from flute and cellosonorities. Leitner connected the pillars acoustically,and as a result of this the sound space surroundingthe sound field changed continuously. The visitor couldbecome immersed in it and could experience themovement and rhythm of the sound figure and thesounds. Leitner created an acoustical space whichcaptured city noises and at the same time adapted itselfto the environment. He used sound to create for peoplea place of concentration on the intersection of publicand private space – a space that changes continuously,always generating a new acoustic atmosphere. Becauseof the acoustical intervention in public space the artiststaged the visitors’ perception and exhibited the siteitself. He made the visitor aware of its acousticalsituation and transformed the perception of this publicspace at the same time.

9. RELOCATION – TRANSFORMATION

Another aspect of sonification is represented in theworks of Bill Fontana, where listening plays the

central role. Listening that exhibits the space itselfrepresents another approach, as does Fontana’sintrusive migrations of acoustic environments. Withhis big sound sculptures, Bill Fontana is one of thesound artists who impact visual perception by inter-vening in the environment by using the acousticalaesthetic practice of relocation. Fontana installs hissound installations in public spaces; he interlacesdifferent acoustical spaces. Like Kubisch, Fontana isan artist who wants to make people aware of theirquotidian acoustical surroundings, alienating soundsin the daily soundscape through intervention andrelocation. Since the 1980s Fontana has made soundsculptures from ordinary sounds. He works withthe phenomenon of relocation, which means that theproduced sound is transmitted far away from the siteof its original production. In his famous work‘Metropolis Koln’, Fontana offered the residents ofCologne the possibility of listening continually andconcentratedly to their city, when he attached 18speakers to a big sound sculpture in centrally locatedRoncalliplatz, in front of Cologne Cathedral. Thespeakers transmitted the sounds that were capturedby 18 microphones placed at various locationsaround Cologne. This sound sculpture changed con-tinually and the sounds varied based on the time andthe surroundings. People who crossed the squarewere surprised to hear sounds that they were notaccustomed to hearing in this environment. Fontanaprovoked an unfamiliar perception of a site that hadseemed so familiar to the city’s residents. The soundsvaried permanently based on the position of the lis-tener and the time of day. Various urban sounds andeven natural noises clashed and formed a new spatialvolume created by virtual sound spaces. On the sitewhere the sounds originated, the real but spatiallyseparated sounds mixed and formed a new soundspace, so that the visual was overlayed by theacoustical in the aesthetic experiential world. The dif-ferent levels of acoustical reception were mixed in therecipient’s consciousness and were not experienced asharmonious with the real sounds; the listener couldhear other things that they could or could not see. Withthis work Fontana made people aware of their dailyenvironment and made it possible for them to discovertheir own site with new eyes and ears; he gave people anew sensual experience of time and space.

10. CONCLUSION

I have given various examples of how artists suc-ceeded in marking and colouring their surroundingssolely by the use of sound. The artists sonify a spaceand create works which are closely related to it. Oneof their most important characteristics is the works’social-cultural aspect, which is always linked to theirsite-specifity. This article has tried to demonstrate the

Sound Art as Sonification, and the Artistic Treatment of Features in our Surroundings 63

variety of artistic treatments of public space, andtried to explain different aspects of sound art inpublic space in the context of an understanding of amodified language of twentieth-century visual art andmusic. It shows an artistic practice that is linked to acritical role in art. I therefore place sound installa-tions into a genealogy of installation practice inpublic space.

One interesting aspect of sonification is the workby Christina Kubisch. She often plays with the his-torical acoustical dimension of a place and tries toreturn its lost acoustical signs. She often works on theboundary between audible and inaudible acousticalsigns. Her new works, ‘The Electrical Walks’, followthe idea of a geography or cartography of omni-present electro-magnetic networks in the cities, as bycarrying headsets the visitor is invited to discover theelectro-magnetic map of a city, and Kubsich leads usin the electro-magnetic atmospheres of everyday dailylife. Urban spaces are reexamined, and social-culturalaspects are evoked by sounds and noises.

Another sonification approach is the work ofRobin Minard, who works from an ecological per-spective to remove sonic pollution. The starting pointof his works was the incredible increase of sonicpollution in our surroundings. With his methods ofconditioning and articulation Minard tries to cleanthe acoustical pollution from the environment andgive it a new atmosphere.

While Minard wants to create a new place by col-ouring the acoustical situation, Bernhard Leitnercreates spaces with sound. His sound fields often referto the acoustical environment but form a new soundsite. Leitner tries to use sound to make us aware ofspaces and to form new ones.

The works by Bill Fontana can also be seen in thiscontext, but his concern is with the relocation ofsounds. He creates an exhibit out of a place by

sending its sound via livestream to another place; thevisitor can listen to it and imagine the place. It is anintense perception of our acoustical surrounding andthe visitor is able to look at the place in a new way.The artistic treatment of a place by Fontana makes itpossible to form a visual imagery in the mind of thelistener. This is one of the main aspects that unites allthe artistic approaches I have tried to describe in thisarticle: sound art deals with sonification and theartistic treatment of features in our surroundings.

REFERENCES

Barthelmes, B. 2000. Sound and Site. Positionen. Beitragezur Neuen Musik 42: 2–6.

Bock, O. 2001. Einflusse und Wechselwirkungen technischerInnnovation und kunstlerischer Kreativitat. Klangin-

stallationen. Technische Universitat Berlin.Breitsameter, S. 1996. Klang(in der)landschaft – sound(e)-

scape to open space. In Klangkunst. Exhibition Catalo-

gue. Munich, New York: Prestel.Buren, D. 1975. Notizen uber die Arbeit im Verhaltnis zu

den Orten, in die sie sich einschreibt, verfasst zwischen

1967 und 1975 und in folgender Auswahl neu zusam-mengestellt. In G. Fietzek and G. Inboden (eds.) DanielBuren. Achtung! Texte 1967–1991. Dresden: Texte zur

Kunst 1995: 202–14.Kemp, W. 1991. Kontexte. Fur eine Kunstgeschichte der

Komplexitat. Texte zur Kunst 2(2): 89–101.Kubisch, C. 2000. KlangRaumLichtZeit. Works from

1980–2000. Exhibition Catalogue. Heidelberg: Kehrer.Minard, R. 1993. Sound Environments, Music for Public

Spaces. Berlin: Akademie der Kunste.

Neuhaus, M. 1994. Sound Works. Ostfildern: Cantz.Rosenthal, M. 2003. Understanding Installation Art. From

Duchamp to Holzer. Munich, New York: Prestel.

Russolo, L. 1919. L’arte dei rumori. In U. Apollonio (ed.)Der Futurismus. Manifeste und Dokumente einer kuns-tlerischen Revolution 1909–1918. Cologne, Dumont,

1972: 86–109.

64 Claudia Tittel

Sound Art (?) on/in Film

JULIO D’ESCRIVAN

Department of Music and Performing Arts, Anglia Ruskin University, East Road, Cambridge, CB1 9JE, UKE-mail: julio.d’escrivan@anglia.ac.uk

The use of sound for representation and narrative may go

beyond what we might conventionally term musical. Film has

gradually brought into focus the practice of sound art as

something distinct from music yet existing at the end of a

unified continuum between abstraction and representation.

Music has gradually been subsumed into the soundtrack as

another element of the film sound world, and sound design is

often on an equal footing with it. Sound designers are now

increasingly exploring the more psychological (as opposed to

merely representational) dimensions of sound.

1. BEYOND MUSIC?

A concierge, in the opening sequences of Jacques Tati’sPlaytime (1967), who must announce Monsieur Hulot’sarrival to the bank operates a complicated electronicpaging system installed on a wall. As he presses all thebuttons on the board, weird, wonderful and humorouselectronic sounds come to life. On one hand, the boarditself has a dramatic persona now: it has a voice. On theother hand, the sound comes to us, almost accidentally,through a medium that has established an alliance withmusic since its inception: film. That sound can beorganised and fixed on film is not a trivial fact. It hasimplications for both media, sound creativity and film.This article is an attempt to trace possible origins andperhaps even elements of an archeology of soundcreativity on the fixed medium of film.To reduce sound art to the creative practice we know

as electronic or electroacoustic music is a mistake. Theusage of sound for dramatic purposes, for representa-tion and narrative goes beyond what we might con-ventionally term musical; in film-sound creativity,concerns with pitch, rhythm and timbre are secondaryto meaning and reference. If we look at sound artistWalter Murch’s work for director George Lucas’ filmTHX1138, for instance, we find editing, placement andre-recordings of the actor’s voices where the mainconcern is to aid the telling of the story by fabricatingcues that allow for a situated perception of sound.Among other techniques, transmitting voices via ana-logue radio broadcast and recording the result whilstfine tuning the reception frequency allowed bothMurchand Lucas to augment the voices with synthesisedharmonic content that made them more futuristicallybelievable. The resulting sound helps render the textualplot in pure sonic terms. An example of this is thecounterpoint of vocal transmissions during THX1138’s

trial scene, where the use of layered voice-overs andradio tuning sounds effectively portray the helplessnessof the character at the mercy of the legal machinery.

Can the term ‘musical’ describe sound construc-tions, such as these, properly? Arguably not. I wouldpropose that we must think in terms of organisedsound even beyond Varese’s definition. We mustthink of the dramatic effect of sound through impliedsignifications and not in terms of its isolated physicalqualities (e.g. pitch and duration). Further, seeing assound on film is there to coexist with the visuals, anyunderstanding of its workings needs to be viewed inthe context of intermedia; that is to say, coexistingmedia that conform, complement or contrast withone another (Cook 2001). In opposition to the innerlogic of pitch, rhythm and timbre found in musicaldiscourse, sound on film cannot be evaluated withoutreference to the image.

The manipulation of meaning by sound on film isachieved through what Rick Altman calls ‘the storyof the sound event’ (Altman 1992). He discusses howa ‘spatial signature’ is carried by the sound thatexhibits the trace of a particular hearing or listeningsituation. This is of course familiar to electroacousticmusic theoreticians through the listening modes dis-cussed by Schaeffer in 1966 in his Traite des objetsmusicaux. Yet Altman’s emphasis is precisely on theinference of referential audio cues from the soundobject as opposed to the reduction of the sound eventto its musical potential. Arguably, this difference iskey in understanding how sound creativity on filmgenerates different formal choices from sound crea-tivity in electronic or electroacoustic music.

Altman’s views provide further understanding of theidea of source identification in the context of film,because he discusses the potential narrative content ofa sound; how the sound conveys the context in which itwas listened to and how this has representational value.For this reason, the choice of sound objects in film(even when they are not used as sound effects) is sub-ject to their referentiality and not to their reducedcharacteristics in the Schaefferian sense.

2. A PLASTIC FORM

Film is possibly the first medium to efficiently accom-modate sound. Since 1929, Russian drawn-soundcomposers Arseny Mikhaylovich Avraamov and

Organised Sound 14(1): 65–73 & 2009 Cambridge University Press. Printed in the United Kingdom. doi:10.1017/S1355771809000090

Yevgeny Sholpo explored the plastic possibilities ofsound on film (Davies 2007). Around this time, inGermany, Fischinger and Moholy-Nagy, amongstothers, also scratched and drew on celluloid as asynthesis method for sound and artistic expression.Not long after the first Russian experiments, in 1932,Fischinger wrote the following in an article entitled‘Sounding Ornaments’:

Between ornament and music persist direct connections,

which means that Ornaments are Music. If you look at astrip of film from my experiments with synthetic sound,you will see along one edge a thin stripe of jagged

ornamental patterns. These ornaments are drawn music– they are sound: when run through a projector, thesegraphic sounds broadcast tones or a hitherto unheard of

purity, and thus, quite obviously, fantastic possibilitiesopen up for the composition of music in the future(Fischinger 1932)

In 1931 in the United States, and with characteristicAnglo-Saxon pragmatism, drawn-sound techniqueswere used by the film-sound crew working for ReubenMammoulian in Jekyll and Hyde to help represent thefirst terrifying transformation of the mad scientist;drawn sound, noise and voice collage are all put todiegetic use with firm musical intuition. Instances suchas these provide insights into the beginnings of soundcreativity on film, and by charting them we can observehow early the foundations are laid for more abstractforms of composition with recorded and synthesisedsounds. Further drawn-sound experiments would becarried out in the 1940s by Norman McLaren inCanada.

Earlier, in Germany, yet roughly parallel to the use ofdrawn-sound techniques, Walter Ruttmann presentedhis Weekend (1930), a de facto musique concrete work(also, perhaps, a very early instance of soundscapecomposition), roughly eighteen years before Schaeffer’stheorising led to similar (although much more abstract)sonic results. Weekend is a work of sound art on thefilm medium, and is normally ‘projected’ on a darkscreen, which, thanks to its presentation, becomes afurther intimation of acousmatic music. Whilst it can-not fairly be called a work ofmusique concrete, it shouldattract our attention in that it is the first piece to tell astory solely by editing sound without visuals, yet stillbeing hosted on the film medium. Perhaps it could bemore convincingly argued as a piece of soundscapecomposition as would be developed many years laterby R. Murray Schafer (Schafer 1973), in any case itremains an interesting historical artefact that bearswitness to the creative possibilities of the film medium.

Both of the approaches discussed above, drawnsound and soundscape composition, were, as far as wecan tell, the precursors of fixed media sonic art orsound art. They are the first practical application ofthe film medium as a means for assembling andpresenting sound art. Since there is no parallel

development in electronic music independently offilm, we could argue that the plastic manipulation ofsound for artistic purposes actually begins on filmand, further, that coexistence with images adds tosound composition a new set of creative concerns:synchrony, synchresis (Michel Chion’s term to definethe relationship of unity surmised from seeingsomething in sync with a possibly unrelated sound),empathetic and anempathetic relationships as well asdifferent narrative roles (Chion 1994). These concernsalso give rise to new treatments of musical form, aswe have also mentioned earlier, where the referenti-ality of a sound justifies its placement within thecompositional structure.

Photoelectric sensitive material, as in early soundfilm, and later 35mm magnetic tape are media thatallow for plasticity and thus naturally became a homefor fixed sound art. This creative exploration ofsound we refer to, independent of traditional musicalinstrumentality, results in what has been called,amongst several terms and to the inconvenience ofmany artists and composers, ‘sound art’. This prac-tice of ordering recorded or synthesised sound eventsin a particular way that, mostly, may not follow‘musical’ criteria, that prizes the referential content ofsound over its acoustic characteristics, may havemany names yet remains an identifiable trend; easierto recognise than to group under one umbrella termthat will please all practitioners.

Two main approaches, then, that prefigure laterpractices in tape music composition seem to be pre-sent in sound creativity on film from the very start:the creation (synthesis) of new sounds, which resultsin ‘photoelectric’ music, and the use of recordedsound as a compositional tool. Both approachespredate musique concrete and elektronische Musik byseveral years.

3. SOUND EFFECTS

If imitation of real noises seems limited and dis-appointing, it is possible that an interpretation of noisesmay have more of a future in it. (Clair 1929)

Once the technology of sound reproduction on filmwas viably established, sound artists did not take longto emerge. Instances such as the Jekyll and Hyde(1931) transformation sequence of Dr Hyde intoMr Jekyll, the sound-designed growling of King Kong(1933) and the drawn-sound experiments of Russiansand later Germans, showed how a whole gamut ofpossibilities were opened. From the more program-matic to the more abstract, different practicesemerged showing an ancient dilemma of musicalpractice: internal versus external signification.

Sound crews in film, from the earliest use ofrecording and editing, have shown that their craft is

66 Julio d’Escrivan

greatly subjective. A sound ‘effect’ is not the actualsound of what we see on screen, so much as the kindof sound we expect to hear; the effect of the sound.Sound effects may also reflect cinematic listeningperspective. They must follow the dramatic guidelinesof film narrative to be useful, thus becoming involvedin an artistic pursuit even if their origins appearlargely functional.It is telling that John Cage points to the creative

possibilities of sound effects in his famous Credo:

Every film studio has a library of ‘sound effects’ recor-ded on film. With a film phonograph it is now possibleto control the amplitude and frequency of any one of

these sounds and to give to it rhythms within or beyondthe reach of anyone’s imagination. Given four filmphonographs, we can compose and perform a quartetfor explosive motor, wind, heartbeat, and landslide.

(Cage 1973)

When Cage delivered his Credo as a lecture in 1937in Seattle, development of the creative possibilitiesof sound effects was, of course, in full progress infilm-making. A fascination with making new soundconstructs, directly supporting visuals or dramaticintention, found a ready home in suspense and thensci-fi genres of the first two decades of ‘talking film’.Functionality was initially more important than pro-viding a sonic commentary that could illustrate thepsychology of a scene. In the 1950s, new films in thescience-fiction genre provided a good canvas for soundcrews looking to go beyond sound as purely diegetic.In The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951), the

opening flight and subsequent landing of a UFO callsfor sounds that intend to make the scene believablewhilst at the same time instilling a sense of awe inthe viewer. In The War of The Worlds (1953), althoughthe music is performed by a conventional orchestrathroughout, the moments when the aliens need to becharacterised, synthetic or manipulated sounds areused, sometimes leading into or out of the orchestraltexture. However, experimentation with sound on filmwas not limited to the sci-fi genre. In 1954, nature-documentary film-maker Jean Painleve went further inhis use of sound effects by creating the underwatersounds of sea urchins through recordings of ‘youngpeople playing pots and pans’ (Hammerton 2006).Painleve called this soundtrack ‘organised noise’ andstated that it was a homage to his compatriot EdgardVarese. Upon listening to this soundtrack it is appar-ent that the sounds have been processed at least interms of editing, speeding and reversing of audiosegments of the original recordings; the same soundsfunction at times in a diegetic manner and alter-natively as straightforward musical accompaniment.Notwithstanding the experiments of Painleve (and

sound crews within the Hollywood studio system insci-fi and ‘B’ films), the promise of celluloid tobecome a medium for sound was not quite realised

for composers or sound artists at this stage. The editingpossibilities offered by film were ample, yet the cost andaccess to the tools were beyond individual artists. Therewere industrial film editing machines, such as theMoviola (invented by Iwan Serrurier in 1924), whichwere available to film-makers through the productioninfrastructure of movie studios but too expensive foranyone wishing to investigate sound for purely artisticpurposes. By providing up to three soundtrack chan-nels, Moviolas enabled creativity to flourish with thepurpose of designing and assembling sound for images,yet other than serving as a final master format for musicon film, they were largely inaccesible to composers andabstract sound artists.

Much has been discussed regarding ForbiddenPlanet (1956) and its ‘electronic tonalities’ by Louisand Bebe Barron, so we will not dwell on this.Although not their first incursion into using electro-nic music in film, it is the first important and largeformat instance of electronic sounds being used tocomplement filmic images instead of traditionalmusic. The sounds conjured by the Barrons oscillatebetween literal representation and mood setting, thusthe distinction between sound effects and musicalaccompaniment becomes blurred.

Just three years later, First Spaceship On Venus(Silent Star), by Kurt Maetzig (1959), employs thesame approach to the soundtrack. Composer AndrzejMarkowski creates, with synthesised means, thesound of a language which has been codified into arock found in the Gobi desert. This rock contains amessage from outer space and a team of scientistsmust translate the sounds into something intelligible.Synthesis is used extensively to animate the rock’smessage, but this device does not stop there. Duringthe film’s space travel sequences we have these syn-thetic sounds doubling as sound effects and strangemusical ambience. This being a film produced behindthe Iron Curtain (an East German and Polishcoproduction) it is not certain how much the makerswere aware of Forbidden Planet, but the soundtreatments are very similar. Since there is hardlyanything written on this film, one can only go by anaural impression, so I would suggest that perhapsthere is more conventional synthesis in Silent Starthan the circuit bending approach that the Barronsare known to have used. In both cases, though, thecontinuously changing interaction between the elec-tronic sounds and the image ranges freely fromapparent conformance to contest (Cook 2001).

Also in the late 1950s, an important multimediaevent took place that involved film and, in a termcoined by one of its creators, ‘organised sound’: Poemeelectronique, an installation by architect Le Corbusierin collaboration with Iannis Xenakis and EdgardVarese (1958) for the Brussels World Fair of 1958. LeCorbusier had conceived the Philips Pavilion as a unit

Sound Art (?) on/in Film 67

of architecture, diffused sound and projected image.Le Corbusier was thinking of an immersive environ-ment where the different media interacted with oneanother in space, and it is in this light that we mustevaluate Varese’s contribution. Although the compo-sition by Varese is a well-known piece in its own rightfor students of electronic music, there seems to havebeen little critical discussion of the fact that this piecewas written for an installation involving film, multipleloudspeakers that allowed for sound placement andthe architectural space itself. It was not commissionedas a piece of concert music. In this sense it may beconsidered sound art for film as well as being a veryearly multichannel installation piece. From a poieticpoint of view, to use the terminology of Nattiez,Varese’s piece is evaluated today mostly as a piece oftape music yet from the point of view of the originalaudience, aesthesically, this music must have shownsome coherence with the visuals it accompanied andthe pavilion itself. Varese’s compositional choices inhis contribution to the Poeme electronique event couldfurther be perceived as a cinematic event, since themere juxtaposition of the two media would createa counterpoint of synchronism, diegesis and moodsetting. Finally, Varese, Le Corbusier and Xenakis’experimentation with localising sound at Brussels (400high-range loudspeakers and 25 bass loudspeakerswere used) was also seeded in film developments asfar back as 1930 when, as explained by Rick Altmanin Sound Space (Altman 1992), projectionists triedswitching, during the film, between an ‘orchestra’ anda dialogue speaker. Altman also discusses how theSociety of Motion Picture Engineers considered in1930 that differently placed speakers with separatesound tracks (belonging to the same multitrack)would aid the effect of sound when synchronised topicture. It seems that Poeme electronique was a grandrealisation of what film sound placement had aspiredto and in fact would develop into towards the end ofthe twentieth century.

4. BEYOND SOUND EFFECTS

The 1960s and 1970s would witness a substantialgrowth in the use of sound on film further liberatedfrom its original diegetic function. Mauricio Kagel –the Argentinian-born, German composer (1931–2008) –is well known in the contemporary music world forhis musical theatre pieces but also for his films. Thesehe wrote and directed himself and, surprisingly, therehas not been much writing on the subject at all –perhaps because it straddles music, electronic musicand experimental film, yet resists classification intoany of these fields alone. In a film such as Antithese(1965) we have a fine electronic soundtrack, whichfunctions much beyond the role of ‘effects’. A scien-tist, perhaps a studio engineer, is seen to gradually

descend into madness as he tinkers with his equip-ment. The sound is an element here on equal footingwith the visuals. Both media receive equal attentionyet it is unclear, even during what seems like anelectronic music interlude (a voice-over says ‘transi-tion one’), when the surreal film plot is led by thesound and when the latter is serving the image.Antithese is unique when viewed from a music andsound point of view, although it seems to owesomething to 1950s sci-fi.

Kagel’s production in this area does not stop atAntithese. In Match fur drei Spieler (1966) two cellistson rotating chairs duel whilst being accompanied by apercussionist. This is a film of a music performancethat becomes a true visual soundtrack when pro-jected. In being a film about the soundtrack, variousforms of contest and complementation (Cook 2001)begin to take shape between the visual and the soundmedia, yet a strangely unified discourse is produced.Opening sounds of tennis playing alert the listener tothe amusing musical bellicosity of the piece and thepercussionist’s interventions function as both soundeffects and sound icons, as in a military-like drum-roll section at the end of the first third of the film orin the use of the sound of dice being cast on a table.Amongst his other films, perhaps the most topical interms of sound art is Hallelujah (1969). In this film achaotic yet arguably exhaustive study of music andsound is realised. The film includes an explanation ofthe vocal production system, extended vocal techni-ques, sound effects and natural ambiences. It alsoincludes scenes where loudspeakers are filmed simplyprojecting sound. As we are led through implausiblejuxtapositions of images where the sound is eitherproduced on screen or overflows as accompanimentto the next, we have time to reflect on the role of thesoundtrack, which articulates the formal structure ofthe film. In one scene, amongst the sounds of birds aman walks through a park with his briefcase, and thesound continues only for us to discover that the ‘bird’sound is actually produced by a soprano in a wheel-chair who ends the scene laughing hysterically. Furtherthan a contest between sound and visuals, perhaps thissequence could be seen as an allegory of the work ofthe foley artist, showing that sounds which appearbelievable on film through the phenomenon ofsynchresis are often unbelievable in real life.

The fascination with filming the soundtrack as it isbeing created, and the film becoming partly a docu-ment of the soundtrack whilst the latter articulatesa related plot-line, was also present in video at thetime. Bruce Nauman, a conceptual artist who hadoriginally been a musician, filmed Playing a Note onthe Violin While I Walk around the Studio in 1967–68(Licht 2007). Untrained in violin playing, Naumanrecords himself on video playing one note on theinstrument as he walks around the room. The sound

68 Julio d’Escrivan

is, however, out of sync with the image. Although thevideo could be said to somehow echo Kagel’s Duoof the same year, where guitars are played in anuntrained way and in surreal scenarios, Nauman’sminimalist offering produces a further disjunction inits avoidance of synchronism. A later video, Lip Sync(1969) is finished roughly at the same time as Kagel’sepic Hallelujah. It shares the similar subject matterof vocal sound production, and Nauman presentsanother minimal and conceptual approach by break-ing synchrony between the sound of the words beingpronounced, ‘lip sync’, and the image of the lipspronouncing them (Licht 2007).Beyond the avant-garde, where sound liberated

from its functionality is clearly at home, we still findinnovative and groundbreaking sound art. In MasakiKobayashi’s Kwaidan (which broadly translates as‘ghost story’ from Japanese, 1965), as the openingcredits roll we read: ‘Toru Takemitsu – sound effects’.Not relegated to the final list of foley workers and re-recorders, the work of the great Japanese composer isactually musique concrete composition for the screen.Kwaidan consists of four short stories, the first ofwhich deals with a Samurai who divorces his wife inKyoto in order to seek better fortune elsewhere. Thesecond wife gives him social standing and fortune buthe is unhappy and decides to go back to the first wife,only to find her ghost instead. The sound effectsassembled by Takemitsu are not in any way tradi-tionally deployed; they are overtly musical. Togetherwith minimal ambience tones, percussive sounds aresequenced throughout the film, helping to tell thestory in a musical way and not as mere support oraugmentation to events on screen. The director goesso far as to eliminate the production sound in favourof the ‘sound effects’ whenever necessary, even ifthese will not synchronise with anything we see. Itseems that we are presented with either Takemitsu’ssounds or the sparse sound of the action taking place.Kobayashi tries to solve the potential confusionbetween the roles of sounds in this way. Takemitsuprovides a secondary narrative in his choice ofsounds, as we gather from the twig-break sound thatintroduces the first story and is later used there toremember the first wife. Other sound objects includecymbals and possibly prepared piano, always with thesheen of studio processing. In a way similar to whatan orchestra would do, Takemitsu’s sounds evoke themood of what we see as opposed to providing its realor augmented sound. For instance, the sound of thefirst wife working her weaving machine is representedby a rhythmical construction which could credibly bethe sound of a wooden machine at work, yet it doesnot synchronise and we are shown that this ‘soundeffect’ is actually a sound-sign, a leitmotif for thefirst wife. This sound object, created by Takemitsu,enriches the scenes where it appears by creating an

ambiguation, a second reading which is parallel to thediegetic process. It sounds like an ‘effect’ yet it workslike music. It complements the reminiscences of thesamurai, giving them a dreamlike character, whilesynchronism is carefully avoided.

A similar and contemporary approach to the soundin Kwaidan is found in another documentary by JeanPainleve. In Amours de la pieuvre (Love Life of theOctopus, 1965), the French director collaborates withPierre Henry from the Groupe de Recherches Musicalesin Paris. Henry’s piece is eclectic and combines abstractelectronic sounds and electroacoustic techniques withoccasional incursions into more traditional musicalideas played on synthesisers (as when an amusing syn-thesised rendition of The Volga Boatmen appears in theoctopus love-making scene). As in other cases discussedearlier, the role of the soundtrack oscillates betweendiegetic and extra-diegetic roles. Something interestingto note from the examples considered above is howmuch sound work that is stylistically ‘modernistic’ joinsmass media through the back door provided by cinema.

In the soundtrack to Solaris (directed by AndreiTarkovsky 1972), Eduard Artemiev reveals for us thepsychic force-field that the planet Solaris exercises onthe orbiting space station, as the character KrisKelvin, a psychologist, arrives in his spaceship. Kelvinis there to investigate the failure of a mission where theteam have lost contact with Earth, only to find themvictims of wild hallucinations. As he first explores theseemingly empty station, he is accompanied by theeerie hum of electrical devices and atmospheric soundsthat cannot be completely ascribed to any givensource. The latter comes to be a constant reminder ofthe power of Solaris as, eventually, Kelvin also fallsprey to the hallucinatory effects of the planet. In thisfilm, we know that Tarkovsky specifically asked for nomusic to be composed in the traditional sense. Arte-miev offered an electroacoustic score, and although inthe end the soundtrack features a chorale by J.S. Bach,‘Ich ruf’ zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ’ (BWV 639) at certainpoints in the film, the main soundtrack is in fact awork of sonic art which blends subtle electroacousticsounds with the production sound of the film.

The oscillation between diegetic and non-diegeticroles can also be found in animated film work as isexemplified in Le Labyrinth (1969) by Polish film-maker Piotr Kamler with electroacoustic music byBernard Parmegiani. Kamler collaborated also withFrancois Bayle among others.

5. SOUND DESIGN

Initially not more than an accidental term, sounddesign has become a way to credit the sound artist onfilm. In a similar way to how the Barrons’ work hadto be credited as ‘electronic tonalities’ on ForbiddenPlanet, Francis Ford Coppola explains how the sound

Sound Art (?) on/in Film 69

designer title arose. In discussing the difficulties WalterMurch had to overcome to finalise and mix the soundfor The Rain People (1969), Coppola tell us:

we wanted to credit Walter for his incredible contribution– not only for The Rain People, but for all the films he was

doing. But because he wasn’t in the union, the unionforbade him getting the credit as sound editor – so Waltersaid, Well, since they won’t give me that, will they let mebe called ‘sound designer’? We said, We’ll try it – you can

be the sound designery (Ondaatje 2002: 53)

Having been named, it seems, sound design legitimisedand encouraged a re-evaluation of the role of the soundartist on film. Having given Murch his role, Coppolawould then ask him, since he considered this film wouldbe in effect a ‘sound composition’ (Ondaatje 2002: 53),to collaborate on The Conversation (1974). Alan Lichtbelieves that this film ‘resonates with the use of repeti-tion in the work of Naumann, La Monte Young, PhilipGlass, and Steve Reich of the same period’ (Licht2007: 208) and it is not too difficult to agree with him.Once the work of the sound artist is elevated andranked similarly to music, it is explicitly allowed anon-diegetic role, one that shadows its more func-tional role of representing the listening experience forthe viewer.

Freely using recordings of everyday sounds tocomplement the visual world of cinema can have eithera multiplying semantic effect or quite the opposite.When detective Harry Caul, in The Conversation,clearly understands the speech he has eavesdroppedupon and registered on tape, our mind moves along tothe next puzzle; that one is solved. Yet when he replaysa segment endlessly where background noise obscuresthe distinction between speech and other sounds, thepossibilities for meaning seem infinite. The way Cop-pola conceived of the film plot and Murch worked onthe detailed sound of recording, playing and scrubbingthrough Caul’s tapes can thus easily be accepted as acomposition in sound.

This preoccupation with the storytelling potentialof designed sound can also be observed in the video-art world as in Bill Viola’s A Non Dairy Creamer(1975) where the sound is purposefully detailed(Licht 2007). In fact, Viola, who has ample experi-ence of sound and at least once collaborated withDavid Tudor in the preparation and setup of Rain-forest IV, frequently utilises manipulated sound asboth diegetic sound and incidental music. In FiveAngels for the New Millennium (2001), five largecinema screens are arranged in a sizable darkenedroom. Divers are seen exploding out of the water invery slow motion (the films are upside down). Thesound, the recording of a water dive, is played as sucha slow buildup that although we are able to associateit with water we may equally perceive it as an eeriemusical gesture that conveys the vastness of thecoloured water-space which slowly splashes on

screen. According to Rhys Davies in The Frequencyof Existence (2004), the sounds in Five Angels are notsimply designed as the slowing down of the watersplash, but water elements (drops, bubbles) are addedfurther to help enhance the visual narrative ofmotion. In one of the Angels, where the camera issituated above the water, the sounds of air and nightinsects help place the viewer within a drone of ‘con-tinuously evolving, unbroken sound’ which Daviesterms ‘archetypal sound’; the sound of key naturalevents such as thunder, wind, lightning, ‘the roar of apredator’ or ‘the cry of a newborn’ (Davies 2004:148). For him, these archetypal sounds convey ‘thefrequency of existence’. Interestingly, when discussingthe use of sound in the work of Viola, Davies drawsparallels with the work of Ben Burtt in George Lucas’Star Wars: A New Hope (1977). He singles out thesound of the first imperial spaceship we see andperceives it as being reminiscent of archetypal sound,and those drones much loved by Viola. Of course,his discussion could equally apply to the work ofMurch in THX1138, and later work such as TheConversation and Apocalypse Now (1979). Murchalso went beyond manipulating sound to manipulat-ing the recorded music film-score, as can be heardin his editing and relayering of Nino Rota’s musicfor the climactic severed horse-head scene in TheGodfather (1972) (Licht 2007). From the interviewswith Murch featured as a bonus to the THX1138DVD released by George Lucas in 2004, we alsoknow that a great part of the music of the film wasinspired in Murch’s tape music manipulations of thePergolesi Stabat Mater (1736). He also explains ingreat details many of his musique concrete techniquesfor creating the sound of futuristic cars (edited taperecordings of a jet-plane fly-by) and motorcycles(processed sounds of women screaming, recordedinside a bathroom).

The development of electronic music instrumentsin the 1980s allowed sound design to flourish in itsnewly recognised role within film-making. Thedemocratisation of editing and production tools hasenabled any interested person to try their hand atcreating sound for film or video. In fact, the dis-tinction between working for film or video has beenblurred for sound artists. In the past, specificknowledge about film footage and its relationship totempi was necessary to create sound or music forfilm. Intricate calculations needed to take place so asto work out how to ‘hit’ a particular cue with a soundor a musical phrase. The process of editing, realisedon ‘flatbeds’ – table Moviola machines – was manualand there had to be a close cooperation between editorand creator. The age of personal computers hasgradually done away with many previous technicallimitations and brought interesting developments tosound artistry on film.

70 Julio d’Escrivan

6. SOUND DESIGN AND MUSIC

Arguably, for new generations who have come toaudiovisual work through computers and digitalvideo, there is no great distinction between differentformats. Now, SMPTE frame offsets can be easilydetermined by clicking and dragging on a graphicuser interface. Since the 1990s increasingly morecomposers for media have also promoted themselvesas sound designers, resulting sometimes in music thatcontains elements of sound work, and sound workthat contains elements of musical thinking.Aesthetically, perhaps we are at a point where

musicians and sound designers inhabit the samecreative space. Yet the ease with which pre-recordedmusics can be processed, edited and layered to image,and mixed with sound effects, foley and ambiencerecordings has arguably made music an element of alarger sound canvas within film. Rather than pro-claiming, as Fischinger, Cage and Varese did, that allsounds are or can be music, the new school ofthought should be that music is another componentof sound composition. Young sound artists workingfor visual media are equally at ease nowadays withslicing music loops as layering the sounds of explo-sions onto a soundscape, all the while syncing topicture.In films such as Delicatessen (dir. Marc Caro,

1991) sound becomes an omniscient narrator as ittravels through the ventilation shafts of the Parisianapartment building where the characters live. We areguided through the plot as the sound of conversa-tions, TVs and music practising are dispersedthrough the building. It overtly competes with themusic to take on an emotion-colouring role, whilstthe latter is often reduced to a diegetic one. In ascene where two of the characters are tuning the‘moo’ sounds of toy-cows, an effective musicalsequence is produced out of the rhythmic testing ofthe pitch of the toys, thus blurring the distinctionbetween diegetic and incidental music roles. In recentfilms such as A Scanner Darkly (dir. Richard Link-later 2006), composer Graham Reynolds processeshis acoustic instruments through digital signal pro-cessing plugins so thoroughly (Hurwitz 2006) as toblur the distinction between foley effects and music.The opening scene, for instance, where imaginarybugs sprawl out of the character’s hair seem like across between acoustic contrabass plucking in thehigh register and sound effects for ‘insect sounds’.It all works musically, yet the music occupies aparticular space as an audio element within theoverall soundtrack. In the final production, this iscontrolled not by a musican but by a sound editor(should read ‘artist’); imposing a more overarchingset of criteria upon the musical contribution as partof the whole soundtrack.

7. SOUND IN LIVE CINEMA

The development of greater computer interactivitywith digital media has also brought a fresh approachto cinematic sound and image. It is now easier thanever to program the image to react to sound and viceversa, as well as modulating both through sensorsor external hardware. Languages such as Processing(a graphics programming language by Ben Reas andCasey Fry), vvvv (developed by Joreg, Max Wolf,Sebastian Gregor and Sebastian Oschatz) or Jitter(the graphic and visual manipulation toolkit forsoftware developer cycling74’s MaxMSP program-ming environment) as well as custom-made applica-tions are easily accessible to any interested party.Mathematical models and all kinds of data can betranslated into image and sound. Abstraction incinematic creation has arguably been given a newlease of life by collaborations between electronicmusicians and visual artists. The medium is no longerthe 35mm celluloid or the 35mm magnetic tape.Frames are no longer divided into the four sprocketsubdivisions, but cut down to the thousandth frac-tion. A growing number of digital artists are willingstill to call this practice ‘cinema’, dampening theancient memory of playing live music to silent film bycreating film out of sound and music interacting withoften abstract image.

The idea of cinema has thus been extended by aconfabulation of electronic musicians and VJs turnedfilm-makers. In a quest to go beyond the ambience-setting task of a VJ or the straight mapping betweenvisuals and sound that can take place in light shows,live cinema artists are trying to develop a newapproach to abstract film. They aim to make theirwork the focus of a performance event: a screen, theaudience in darkness and immersive sound. To quoteone of them, Boris Debackere, ‘Cinema is a virtualcapsule with a projection screen as a window, whichgives access to an audiovisual trip through time andspace’ (Debackere 2008). Artists like Klipp Av (Collinsand Oloffson), Frank Brechtschneider, XNOGRAFIKZ(Arturo Gil and Martha Cervantes), ROTOR (Borisand Brecht Debackere) amongst many others are allengaged in what can be termed as a live cinematicexploration, yet the way they will categorise them-selves may vary substantially. What they all have incommon is their use of live computer interactionbetween sound and images that are presented in alarge-screen format during performance or installa-tion. This work can be perceived as cinematic andevaluated with reference to the broader referentialspace of film. From cinema they inherit key aspects ofthe audiovisual language regarding issues of syn-chronism, the perception of image versus sound size,editing rhythms and so on. What interests us is thattheir exploration is largely informed by sound and

Sound Art (?) on/in Film 71

its manipulation processes on one hand, and theexploration of sound and image together in animprovised or generative setting on the other.

In Boris Debackere’s Probe (2008), generativesound and image are triggered by the viewer as theymove within the projection theatre, allowing for animmersive interactive experience. There is no doubtthat Debackere’s concerns regarding the relationshipof sound to image is grounded in the culture of film.His is an art which directly descends from the practiceof the, now traditional, sound designer for film.

8. CONCLUSIONS

It is interesting to note that within film productioncrews, at least from the 1960s onwards, thoseentrusted with audio production have often beenknown as sound artists, in a matter-of-fact unpre-tentious way (Ondaatje 2002: 52–3). Film has gra-dually brought into focus the practice of sound artas something distinct from music yet existing at theend of a unified continuum between abstraction andrepresentation. Music has gradually been subsumedinto the soundtrack as another element of the filmsound world and sound design is often on an equalfooting with it. Sound designers are increasinglyentrusted with complex non-diegetic tasks that wereformerly only performed by film music, thus explor-ing the more psychological dimensions of sound. Afair evaluation of the work of sound artists in film isstill largely virgin territory, especially regarding itsdifferentiation from musical practice. Live cinema,computer games and immersive audio installations allderive in some way from the cinematic experience; thedevelopment of sound for film stretches beyond film.Finally, the examples viewed in this article show thatlabels are inadequate to contain the work of artists insound and musicians exploring noise musically.Through the midwifery of film, creativity in soundhas finally begun to be appreciated on an equalfooting with traditional music practice.

REFERENCES

Altman, Rick. 1992. The Material Heterogeneity of

Recorded Sound. In Rick Altman (ed.) Sound Theory,Sound Practice. New York and London: Routledge.

Cage, John. 1973. Silence. London: Marion Boyars Publishers.Chion, Michel. 1994. Audio-Vision: Sound on screen. New

York: Columbia University Press.Clair, R. 1929. The Art of Sound. In E. Weis (ed.) Film

Sound: Theory and practice. New York: Columbia

University Press.Cook, Nicholas. 2001. Analysing Musical Multimedia.

Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Davies, Hugh. Drawn Sound. In L. Macy (ed.) Grove MusicOnline. http://www.grovemusic.com (accessed 9 June2007).

Davies, Rhys. 2004. The Frequency of Existence. In ChrisTownsend (ed.) The Art of Bill Viola. London: Thames

and Hudson.Debackere, Boris. 2008. Programme notes to ‘Probe’. In

programme of Sonic Acts XII: The Cinematic Experi-

ence. Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 21–24 February2008.

Fischinger, Oskar. 1932. Sounding Ornaments. Originally

published in Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung. http://www.oskarfischinger.org/Sounding.htm (accessed on 1August 2008).

Hammerton, J. 2006. Booklet notes. In Jean Painleve,

1927–78 Science is Fiction/The Sounds of Science, thefilms of Jean Painleve [DVD BFIVD719]. London:British Film Institute.

Hurwitz, Matt. 2006. A Scanner Darkly: Acoustic flavoursenrich paranoiac score. http://mixonline.com/sound4picture/film_tv/audio_scanner_darkly (accessed on 1

August 2008).Licht, Alan. 2007. Sound Art, Beyond Music, Between

Categories. New York: Rizzoli.

Ondaatje, Michael. 2002. The Conversations: WalterMurch and the art of editing film. London: BloomsburyPublishing.

Schaeffer, J. 1966. Traite des objets musicaux. Paris: Edi-

tions du Seuil.Schafer, R. Murray. 1973. The Music of the Environment.

In Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner (eds.) Audio

Culture, Readings in Modern Music. New York andLondon: Continuum, 2006.

FILMOGRAPHY

Cooper, M.C. and Schoedsack, E.B. 1933. King Kong[DVD]. USA: RKO Radio Pictures.

Coppola, F.F. 1969. The Rain People [DVD]. USA:American Zoetrope.

Coppola, F.F. 1972. The Godfather [DVD]. USA: Para-mount Pictures.

Coppola, F.F. 1974. The Conversation [DVD]. USA:American Zoetrope.

Coppola, F.F. 1979. Apocalypse Now [DVD]. USA: Zoe-

trope Studios.Caro, M. and Jeunet, J.P. 1992. Delicatessen [DVD].

France: Constellation.

Fischinger, O. 2006. Oskar Fischinger: Ten Films [DVD].USA: Center for Visual Music.

Haskin, B. 1953. The War of the Worlds [DVD]. USA:

Paramount Pictures.Kagel, M. 1965. Antithese [Internet Streaming Video].

http://www.ubu.com/film/kagel.html (accessed in July2008).

Kagel, M. 1966. Match [Internet Streaming Video].http://www.ubu.com/film/kagel.html (accessed in July2008).

Kagel, M. 1967. Duo [Internet Streaming Video]. http://www.ubu.com/film/kagel.html (accessed in July 2008).

Kagel, M. 1969. Hallelujah [Internet Streaming Video].

http://www.ubu.com/film/kagel.html (accessed in July2008).

Kobayashi, M. 1965. Kwaidan [DVD]. Japan: Bungei.

72 Julio d’Escrivan

Kamler, P. 1970. Le Labyrinthe in Piotr Kamler: A larecherche du temps [DVD]. France: Aaa.

Lucas, G. 1977. Star Wars [DVD]. USA: Lucasfilm.Lucas, G. 1971. THX 1138 [DVD]. USA: American Zoetrope.Linklater, R. 2006. A Scanner Darkly [DVD]. USA: Warner

Independent Movies.Maetzig, K. 1962. First Spaceship On Venus (Silent Star)

[DVD]. Germany: Deutsche Film (DEFA).

Mamoulian, R. 1931. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde [DVD]. USA:Paramount Pictures.

Painleve, J. 1927. Amours de la pieuvre in Science is Fiction/The Sounds of Science, the films of Jean Painleve [DVD].

London: British Film Institute.Ruttmann, W. 1930. Wochende [CD]. France: Metamkine.Tarkovsky, A. 1972. Solaris [DVD]. London: Artificial Eye.

Tati, J. 1973. Playtime [DVD]. France: Jolly Film.Wise, R. 1951. The Day the Earth Stood Still [DVD]. USA:

Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation.

Wilcox, F. 1956. Forbidden Planet [DVD]. USA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

Sound Art (?) on/in Film 73

Impure Thinking Practices and Clinical Acts:The sonorous becomings of Heidi Fast

GASCIA OUZOUNIAN

School of Music and Sonic Arts, Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast, Northern Ireland, BT7 1NN, UKE-mail: gascia@gmail.com

This article introduces the recent sound works of Heidi Fast, a

Finnish voice and performance artist. Fast’s creative practice

operates between art and philosophy, and articulates several

‘zones of becoming’: what Fast designates as ‘the clinical’, ‘the

virtual’ and ‘vocal thought-material’. Using a methodology of

routing, the article shows how these zones emerge as aesthetic,

ethical and political concerns within Fast’s work.

Since 2005, Fast’s sound works have variously taken shape

as miniature concerts, social sculptures, imaginary sound-

scapes and environmental music performances. Drawing upon

the writings of theorists who have helped shape her practice,

this article argues that Fast uses sound and voice to propose

an ‘actualising philosophy’. This philosophy actualises

virtualities (unrealised potentials), affecting transformative

shifts through tiny mutations in perceptions and behaviours.

’route-: a pathway, or opening, between two places

[place]: a network of relations

[ybecomingy]: a place of mutation

’[yvoicey]-: a sonorous route; a sonorous place; asonorous place of mutation

1. INTRODUCTION

’I pay attention to vocalization into the world, thevocalizing of one’s own becoming (Fast 2005) -[y]’The notion of becoming does not simply refer to the factthat the self does not have a static being and is in con-stant flux. More precisely, it refers to an objective zone

of indistinction or indiscernibility that always existsbetween any two multiplicities (Smith 1997) -

In her 2008 text Compassionate Zones, the Finnish artistHeidi Fast coins a remarkable phrase to describe an

area in which her creative practice develops: ‘vocalthought-material’ (Fast 2008a). By connecting what aretypically disjointed terms – an act of routing – Fastposits a radical concept: that thought is not an imma-terial form but a material substance, and that this sub-stance can be located within the material productions ofthe voice. More specifically, Fast claims that her prac-tice develops between ‘vocal thought-material’ and twoother zones: ‘the clinical’ and ‘the virtual’. In her works,‘the clinical’ emerges as a state of art-working whereinroutes, passageways or openings are created betweendisparate bodies, engaging them in processes of recoveryor ‘co-healing’ (see Ettinger 2005; Ettinger and Virtanen2005; Fast 2008). Fast employs the term ‘virtual’ inthe Deleuzian sense, as unactualised potential.

This article shows how ‘the clinical’ and ‘the virtual’operate within Fast’s creative practice, and it providesconceptual routes for travelling between these zonesof becoming. It introduces Fast’s vocal works since2005, which have variously taken shape as miniatureconcerts, social sculptures, imaginary soundscapesand environmental performances. Using Fast’s ownmethodology of routing, it connects Fast’s practice tothe writing of theorists who have helped shape it:Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Bracha L. Ettinger,Alan Badiou, Akseli Virtanen and others. Throughthese routings, this article show that Fast’s worksinterrupt dominant ideas about what art is and whatart does, and more specifically about what sound artis and what sound art does. It maintains that herpractice is ultimately not located within the field of artbut within a zone of indistinction between art andphilosophy, where it proposes an ‘actualising philoso-phy’. This philosophy actualises virtualities (unrealisedpotentials), affecting transformative shifts throughsmall mutations in perceptions and behaviours – dis-placements specifically centred upon refocusing rela-tionships between bodies and environments.

2. ZONES OF INDISTINCTION: ART AND

PHILOSOPHY

’We must learn to think transversally (Guattari

2000: 43)-

In their co-written treatise What is Philosophy? GillesDeleuze and Felix Guattari embark upon an unusually

Figure 1. G. Ouzounian. Map of Akseli Virtanen’s Place ofMutation (see Virtanen 2007).

Organised Sound 14(1): 75–81 & 2009 Cambridge University Press. Printed in the United Kingdom. doi:10.1017/S1355771809000107

contradictory premise – unusual not in its oppositionalstance, but in that it opposes their own larger philoso-phical project. Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophiestypically develop within logics of multiplicity, hetero-geneity, difference; they provide use-readers with toolsfor nomad thinking (see Deleuze and Guattari 2008).By contrast,What is Philosophy? works to delimit – notbroaden – conceptual boundaries. It argues that philo-sophy can be defined as the creation of concepts, and itproposes that concepts share the following properties:they are multiple, heterogeneous, necessarily connectedto other concepts, self-positing, incorporeal, and theyinvolve ‘becomings’ (i.e. they develop within pro-cesses of actualisation) (Deleuze and Guattari 1994:1–34).

Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of philosophyas a creative enterprise may be compelling, but theway in which they arrive at it is in doubt: namely, thatthey define philosophy in opposition to other creativeenterprises, such as science and art. They write: ‘philo-sophy extracts concepts y whereas science extractsprospects y and art extracts percepts and affects’(Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 24). With regards to sci-ence, they claim that ‘it is pointless to say that there areconcepts in science y science needs only propositionsor functions’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 33). Similarly,they claim that the work of art is ‘a being of sensationand nothing else’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 164). Inan unsubtle crescendo of delimiting thought, they closethe first chapter of What is Philosophy? with the fol-lowing statement: ‘The concept belongs to philosophyand philosophy alone’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 34).

It is understandable that Deleuze and Guattari wouldreserve special characteristics for philosophy, scienceand art (and they are careful to note that none is asuperior enterprise). Still, it is jarring that they fail toconsider the interstitial spaces wherein these fieldsconverge and produce one another. What of the space,for example, where art meets philosophy – where artnot only creates sensations but also concepts, and wherephilosophy, in turn, becomes sensational? It is withinsuch a zone of indistinction that a creative enterprisesuch as Heidi Fast’s develops.

Alain Badiou describes this very same zone ofindistinction in his 2005 text Infinite Thought. Here,Badiou writes of the ‘postmodern orientation’ incontemporary philosophy that it:

activates what might be called mixed practices, de-tota-lized practices, or impure thinking practices. It situatesthought on the outskirts, in areas that cannot be cir-

cumscribed. In particular, it installs philosophical thoughtat the periphery of art, and proposes an untotalizablemixture of the conceptual method of philosophy and the

sense-oriented enterprise of art. (Badiou 2003: 33)

While I would not ascribe to it a specifically post-modern orientation (in that it is not particularly

concerned with deconstructing modernity), I under-stand Fast’s practice as a mixed practice, a de-totalised practice, an impure thinking practice – onethat critically contaminates the fields of both art andphilosophy. In introducing it, therefore, my questionsare: what are the concepts that Fast’s art-workingcreates, and what are the sensations that her philo-sophy produces?

3. THE CLINICAL

’ The philosopher of the future is both artist and

doctor (Deleuze 2001: 66) -[y]’ The artist who is yworked through by virtual strings practices her art – artthat is an aesthetic-in-action – as a healing, healing thatis an ethics-in-action (Ettinger 2005: 707) -

Although Heidi Fast describes herself as a voice artistand performance artist on different occasions, shefeels she is ‘not thoroughly inside the field of art, andat the same time, not thoroughly outside it, either’(Fast 2008c). Many contemporary artists conceive oftheir practice in interdisciplinary terms; what distin-guishes Fast are the particular terms of her border-crossing. For the last few years, Fast has developed a‘project of health’ at the centre of her work, one thataims for the ‘micro-recuperation or recovery ofhumanity’ (Fast 2008c). She conceives of this clinicalproject in ecological terms, as ‘making and resusci-tating or ‘‘restoring to life’’ a multifaceted relation-ship with the surrounding life’ (Fast 2008c).

Fast began to explore the realm of the clinical in atwenty-minute vocal work, Health Tones (2005),which she presented several times at the FinnishTheatre Academy in 2005. Health Tones was held in asparse black-box theatre in which chairs were arran-ged in two semi-circles, with loudspeakers placed attheir sides and at their back. For each performance,Fast gave a text to half the audience, and headphonesto the other half. She then took a microphone andbegan to ‘let voices out’ (Fast 2008b). Fast recalls:

I held the microphone at my neck, or at my chest, or atthe back of my neck. At first, I sang these more ‘silent’voices. Then, I sang some stronger ones. The point was

not how the voices would sound as such, but the co-resonance of the particular sound in and from my body,the microphone, and the headphones as inseparablefrom my body, like the ends of a link or a thread. (Fast

2008c)

After redistributing the text and headphones andrepeating this performance, Fast played a digital tapepart of pre-recorded vocalisations. She had recordedthese at various locations with the help of an assistantwho miked her at different distances. Fast ‘sangwith the tape and with the situation’, once againusing the microphone to amplify her live voice (Fast2008b).

76 Gascia Ouzounian

Health Tones evolved out of several concerns. Forone, Fast wanted to break from the musical tradi-tions within which she had been trained and pro-fessionally active, namely jazz and popular music.For Fast, these traditions were limited in their con-ception of the voice as a strictly musical instrument.Rather than explore musical constructions, Fastwanted to employ the voice as a vehicle throughwhich to investigate such abstract realms as ‘thedistances between bodies’. This aesthetic considera-

tion is clearly audible in the tape part, a richly variedsequence of verbal and non-verbal vocalisations. Theverbal parts feature Fast speaking phrases such as ‘Iam starting to become’. The non-verbal vocalisationsare alternately short and long in duration, even andbroken in tone, soft and loud, heard as individualvoices or as dense layers of voices, sequences of voicesand chords. Each category or ‘instance’ of voice isspatialised such that it is heard at multiple locations,distances and intensities, moving towards and awayfrom the listening body at varying speeds and direc-tions, always illustrating Fast’s idea that ‘the voice isthe spatialization of the body’ (Fast 2008b).

It is within this spatialisation of the voice that Fast’sconception of the clinical emerges: in Health Tones, thevoice arrives at the listening body, penetrates it, andchanges its composition at a multitude of rates, direc-tions and intensities. In doing so, it creates an aware-ness of the listening body as a place, a plane, a milieu:a set of intersecting locations, a network of relations.It is within this heightened state of connectivity andawareness of the body-as-place – one whose existence iscontingent upon the existence of other bodies/places –that transformation, or recovery, becomes possible. ‘Torecover’, writes Fast, ‘means crucially to transform’(Fast 2008a). The transformation that Fast imaginesis of an ecological nature; it functions by inducing ‘agreater sense of the interconnectedness betweenhumanity and non-humanity’ (Bennett 2004: 367).

-Ecology is the study or story (logos) of the place where

we live, or better, the place that we live y that place is adynamic flow of matter-energy that tends to settle intovarious bodies, bodies that often join forces, make con-

nections, form alliances (Bennett 2004: 365).’

Fast’s conception of the clinical state of sound is atonce an ethics and an aesthetics. It locates withinthe field of art the responsibility to produce work thatconsiders its position within a larger network ofplaces, and it suggests a practical framework throughwhich to do so. Specifically, it points to the uniquecapability of sound to exist as a ‘matter-energy’ thatcan reside within, move between, penetrate andtransform bodies. In Health Tones, voice manifestsor materialises the clinical state. It is not organisedaccording to musical traditions or in order to trans-mit performances of virtuosity, but as a means forengendering a critical awareness of the placed bodyin relation to other bodies. More specifically, HealthTones aims for a transformative recognition of thelistening body as a place of mutation: one thatdevelops within multiple networks of becoming.

4. THE VIRTUAL

-I find, first of all, that I pass from state to state y I

change, without ceasing to change. But this is not saying

Figures 2 and 3. Heidi Fast performing in Health Tones

(2005) at the Finnish Theatre Academy. Photos by SamiPerttila. Images courtesy of Heidi Fast.

Impure Thinking Practices and Clinical Acts 77

enough. Change is far more radical than we are firstinclined to suppose (Bergson 1911: 1). ’[y]- It is not

necessary to destroy everything nor begin a completelynew world. It is sufficient to displace this cup or thisbush or this stone just a little, and thus everything.

(Agamben 1993: 53)’

Fast has written that her work is always politicaland critical, but that the transformations it proposestake place ‘on a scale of small displacements or smallimpetuses y The actualisation and the thinking [inmy work] are only slight mutations or slight changes,not trying to change things all at once’ (Fast 2007b).Fast’s use of sound and voice is critical in this regard.She writes:

The voice – or sound in general – is not divisible into partsthat can be controlled or quantified. Sound is not easily

delimited. This is political, even though it may not bevisible. My essential goal is to establish small islets thatdeal with multiplying the power in us, or in a nonhuman

world. That is, to resist the violent praxis in societythrough intensities other than strong or powerful resis-tances: to ruffle and round the edges between interior andexterior, to open up the in-between. (Fast 2007b)

In 2006, Fast presented two sound works thatillustrate this process of affecting transformativeshifts through slight mutations. Both works werepresented as part of the urban art project ‘UnknownCity: From Place to Place’, and both took place inand around Hesperia Park, a sprawling urban park inHelsinki. The first, A Nightsong Action, was a ‘vocalcourse’ through the park. For this work, Fast hand-delivered letters of invitation to five hundred apart-ments surrounding the park. These read:

This letter invites you to A Nightsong Action.

To salute the spring. To diversify human voice in ourcommon, public urban space.

I will walk along Hesperia Park and sing a long and eventone. Answer me with your own voice, from your win-dow or balcony (or your neighbor’s) when you hear my

voice, or come down to the street and sing with me! Singwith your voice until you no longer hear the others, orcontinue for as long as you wish.

The point of A Nightsong Action is not to strive for theclarity or beauty of the voice. You can (and should, if

you wish), join it with very hoarse or clear singing, withwhispers or shouts that ‘become’ from your throat. [y]

Approximately a dozen people arrived for A NightsongAction. Fast sang long and even tones, and the par-ticipants joined her with ‘murmurs, shouts, andsilence’ (Fast 2008b). Residents of nearby buildingsintermittently joined with vocalisations from theirwindows, or simply watched the action unfoldbeneath them.

Fast observes that A Nightsong Action ‘did nothave any special meaning or function y it was an

unfunction in a way’, and recalls that many partici-pants were self-conscious in that ‘it did not involvesinging collective songs, but just making [meaninglesssounds]’ (Fast 2008b). These observations point tothe ways in which A Nightsong Action’s ‘un-func-tionality’ was critically transformative, specificallywith regard to the participants’ relationship to theirurban surroundings. A Nightsong Action invitedparticipants to realise, through simple vocal acts, anew kind of city. The Finnish political theorist Akseli

Figures 4–6. Heidi Fast and participants in A NightsongAction. Images courtesy of Heidi Fast.

78 Gascia Ouzounian

Virtanen writes that, in Western cultures, the place ofthe polis [city] has been situated in ‘the transforma-tion from voice to language’ (Virtanen 2004: 211). InPolitics, for example, Aristotle argues that:

Among living beings only man has language. The voice isthe sign of pain and pleasure, and this is why it belongs toother living beings [y]. But language is for manifesting

the fitting and the unfitting and the just and the unjust. Tohave sensation of the good and the bad and of the just andthe unjust is what is proper to men as opposed to other

living beings, and the community of these things makesdwelling and the city. (Virtanen 2004: 211)

A Nightsong Action posits an oppositional politics, inthat its sonorous productions move not from voice tolanguage, but precisely in the opposite direction: fromlanguage to voice. A Nightsong Action re-inserts thenon-linguistic, collective voice into a public/urbanspace. Through this small mutation, it momentarily‘un-does’ the traditional expression of the city, invitingparticipants to realise a different, more interconnectedversion. In this way, A Nightsong Action actualises avirtual city – urban forms and expressions that exist aspotentials, but that must be actualised in order toemerge into view.Another work that Fast presented for the ‘Unknown

City’ project similarly aimed to bring about transfor-mative shifts through the small mutation – whatGiorgio Agamben has called ‘the tiny displacement’(Agamben 1993: 53). This work was so slight, in fact,that it never actually materialised but existed as meresuggestion. Sculpture of Silence – A Suggestion (2006)took the form of a poster that Fast mounted on thefront window of a shop overlooking Hesperia Park.The poster contained a suggestion for an imaginarysoundscape in the park: a place wherein certain soundswould disappear through the use of a microphone–loudspeaker configuration within which certain incom-ing waveforms would be outputted out of phase. Thisnegative sound-sculpture would thus comprise nothingmore than ‘a range of silences’ (Fast 2008b).Fast conceived of Sculpture of Silence upon obser-

ving that, at a particular location in the park, differentelements conspired to create a particularly noisyatmosphere. Her ‘suggested sculpture’ was a kind ofmomentary resistance to this noise. Unlike othersculptures in the park, Fast’s would not take the formof a monument whose purpose it would be to awe thepublic through a permanent spatial inscription. Instead,it would be a temporary, inconspicuous marking whosepower would derive not from its greatness but from itsslightness – its ability to affect change through small,even negative, acts. Like A Nightsong Action, Sculptureof Silence would potentially reveal a different spatialexpression through tiny displacements, in this caseinviting momentary shifts in thoughts, perceptions andbehaviours in order to actualise a virtual silent space.

5. VOCALITY AND PLACE

-Co-poietic transformational potentiality evolves

along aesthetic and ethical paths, strings and threads,and produces a particular kind of knowledge (Ettinger2005: 703)’

Fast’s actualising philosophy works on the level ofthe tiny displacement or the small mutation, and usesthe voice to enable or actualise virtual worlds. Attimes, these virtual worlds are public ones, collectivelyimagined and enacted; at other times, they straddlepublic and private spaces, inviting audiences to re-imagine their everyday lives and the everyday spacesthey inhabit as sites of transformational potentiality.

In 2006, Fast presented the vocal work AmorousDialogues – Practicing Acoustic Ranges (2006) in andaround a residential apartment building over thecourse of two days. On the first day, Fast gave an‘open concert’ in a temporarily vacant apartmentinside the building. For this, she assembled a panoplyof materials: five loudspeakers, a synthesiser/samplerfor triggering pre-recorded vocal samples, two videos,a blanket with a poem sewn into it, and a postercontaining another poem. All the texts were medita-tions on place. Fast’s invitation to Amorous Dialoguesread:

Heidi Fast invites a listener to a home that is not hers;where both are visitors. To a particular home, or ques-

tion, about dwelling, inhabiting, adopting, to a placethat is not quite any more, or not quite yet anybody’s.She brings to this apartment – a place that is becoming

quiet – her own acoustic ‘place’ and a voice that hasbeen composed for the space but that happens onlytemporarily. She creates vocal routes for an intimate

dialogue between the visitor, the material and acoustic‘residues’ of the home, the traces of dwelling and living,and herself. In opening the home to the public, the voice

also calls out to other apartments in the building.

During the open concert Fast used the sampler/synthesiser to play prerecorded vocalisations. Shenotes that ‘the voice inside the apartment was‘‘echoing’’ to other apartments inside the building,opening the home towards the public, while externalsounds entered the space through open windowsinside the apartment’ (Fast 2007a).

The second part of Amorous Dialogues, which tookplace the following afternoon, was a ‘social sculpture’called Song of the Dwellings. For this, Fast invitedaudiences and residents of the apartment building tovocalise with her while moving up and down the cen-tral staircase of the building. Approximately thirtypeople participated, including residents of the buildingwho opened their doors for the event.

With Amorous Dialogues, Fast intended to actualisea virtual world that would intersect with listeners’everyday lives and thereby transform their relation-ships to their everyday surroundings and to one

Impure Thinking Practices and Clinical Acts 79

another. As such, Amorous Dialogues can be locatedwithin a history of sound art that seeks to reconfigureexperiences of the everyday through an engagementwith sound, and within philosophies of everyday lifethat position the everyday as a site rife with transfor-mational potentiality (cf. Lefebvre 1947; Lefebvre1961; Bachelard 1994 [1958]; Debord 1961). In the late1960s, as theories of everyday life proliferated in thewritings of such philosophers as Henri Lefebvre, GastonBachelard and Guy Debord, the American artist MaxNeuhaus – who coined the term ‘sound installation art’– took audiences on listening walks that were intended

to foster a renewed attachment to their everydayenvironments. Neuhaus writes of his LISTEN (1967)works that:

I would ask the audience at a concert or lecture to collectoutside the hall, stamp [the word ‘LISTEN’ onto] theirhands, and lead them through their everyday environ-

ment. Saying nothing, I would simply concentrate onlistening y The group would proceed silently, and bythe time we returned to the hall many had found a new

way to listen for themselves. (Neuhaus 1988).

With the LISTEN series Neuhaus proposed that anactive, focused listening could bring about a trans-formation of ‘space’ into ‘place’, meaning that anotherwise mundane environment could be renderedmeaningful simply by listening to it. LISTEN not onlyprecipitated Neuhaus’s earliest sound installations, italso inspired an enduring tradition of sound art thatreconstitutes the everyday through sonic interventions.

Figures 7–9. Heidi Fast and audience members in the ‘openconcert’. Photos by Pekka Makinen. Images courtesy of

Heidi Fast.

Figures 10 and 11. Heidi Fast and participants in Song ofthe Dwellings. Photos by Pekka Makinen. Images courtesy

of Heidi Fast.

80 Gascia Ouzounian

In the case of Amorous Dialogues, Fast invitesparticipants not only to listen to their everydayenvironments, but to vocalise in and through them –an act that draws their attention both to the ‘voices’of the places they inhabit, and to their own roles inconstructing these voices. And, whereas Neuhaus hadsought to bring about a transformation from space toplace with his LISTEN works, with Amorous Dialo-gues Fast intends to foster a sense of placelessness,asking audiences to join her in ‘becoming strangers’in their own homes – to collectively lose their sense ofbelonging to place. In order to carry out this trans-formation from place to non-place, Fast deploys thevoice in such a way that it blurs the boundariesbetween interior/exterior, private/public and indivi-dual/collective, recalling Paulo Virno’s idea that:

In today’s forms of life one y the coupling of the termspublic-private, as well as the coupling of the terms col-

lective-individual, can no longer stand up on their own[y] Today, all forms of life have the experience of ‘‘notfeeling at home’’ y there is nothing more shared and

more common, and in a certain sense more public, thanthe feeling of ‘‘not feeling at home’’. (Virno 2004: 24–34)

In drawing audiences’ attention to their everydayspaces in a way that continuously defamiliarises them,Fast reveals not only virtual worlds but also virtualselves: unstable identities that straddle the spaces offoreignness/belonging, guest/resident, individual/collec-tive. She fosters these virtual identities by modulatingeveryday environments with the voice – a substance sounstable that it permanently resides between states ofbeing (materiality and immateriality, corporeality andincorporeality) – and finally posits that the voice itself isthe ultimate place of mutation.

6. CONCLUSION

-Everything will be as it is now, just a little different

(Walter Benjamin, quoted in Agamben 1993: 53)’

Fast’s creative practice, while generally belonging to thetradition of sound art, is more precisely an art ofroutings, displacements and mutations. It works on thelevel of the tiny displacement in order to affect trans-formational shifts: it reveals, for example, alternativeexpressions of the city that develop in active relation tothe voice, imaginary places of silence within noisyurban environments, the unstable boundaries betweenprivate/public and individual/collective, the foreignnessof everyday spaces, and the hidden connections betweendisparate bodies – all virtualities that are actualisedthrough their connection to the voice. Ultimately,Fast’s creative practice displaces itself from the field ofsound art into other fields of production. As a creativeenterprise, Fast’s is equally an art-working and anactualising philosophy, one that puts the sensationalenterprise of art to the task of actualising virtualities.

Positioning the voice as a place of mutation, Fast’swork transforms our understanding of the limits ofboth artistic and philosophical practice.

REFERENCES

Agamben, G. 1993 [1990]. The Coming Community. Min-neapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Bachelard, G. 1994 [1958]. The Poetics of Space: The classiclook at how we experience intimate spaces. Trans. M.

Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press.Badiou, A. 2003 [1992]. Infinite Thought: Truth and the

return to philosophy. Trans. O. Feltham and J. Clemens.

London: Continuum Books.Bennett, J. 2004. The Force of Things: Steps toward an

ecology of matter. Political Theory 32(3): 347–72.

Bergson, H. 1911. Creative Evolution. Trans. A. Mitchell.London: Macmillan.

Debord, G. 1961. Perspectives for Conscious Alternations

in Everyday Life. http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/89.

Deleuze, G. 2001. Pure Immanence: Essays on a life. Trans.A. Boyman. New York: Zone Books.

Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. 1994. What is Philosophy?Trans. H. Tomlinson. London: Verso.

Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. 2008 [1980]. A Thousand

Plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Trans. B. Mas-sumi. London: Continuum Books.

Ettinger, B. L. 2005. Co-Poiesis. Ephemera: Theory & politics

in organization 5(10): 703–13.Ettinger, B. L. and Virtanen, A. 2005. Art, Memory, Resis-

tance. Ephemera: Theory & politics in organization 5(10):690–702.

Fast, H. 2005. On the Event of Voice. Unpublished manu-script.

Fast, H. 2007a. Personal communication with the author.

Fast, H. 2007b. Artist statement.Fast, H. 2008a. Compassionate Zones. Unpublished manu-

script.

Fast, H. 2008b. Interview with the author.Fast, H. 2008c. Personal communication with the author.Guattari, F. 2000 [1989]. The Three Ecologies. Trans. I.

Pindar and P. Sutton. London: The Athalone Press.Lefebvre, H. 1947. Critique de la vie quotidienne. Paris:

Grasset.Lefebvre, H. 1961. Critique de la vie quotidienne II. Paris:

L’Arche.Neuhaus, M. 1988. LISTEN. http://www.max-neuhau-

s.info/soundworks/vectors/walks/LISTEN.

Smith, D. 1997 [1993]. Introduction. In G. Deleuze EssaysCritical and Clinical. Trans. D. Smith and M. A. Greco.Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Virno, Paulo. 2004. A Grammar of the Multitude, For anAnalysis of Contemporary Forms of Life. Trans. I. Berto-letti, J. Cascaito and A. Casson. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).

Virtanen, A. 2004. General Economy: The entrance of

multitude into production. Ephemera: Theory & politicsin organization 4(3): 209–32.

Virtanen, A. 2007. The Place of Mutation: Vagus, nomos,

multitudo. Trans. L. Aholainen. Pori: Iconoclast Pub-lications. http://ic98.1g.fi/akseli.pdf

Impure Thinking Practices and Clinical Acts 81

Cantata of Fire: Son et lumiere in WacoTexas, auscultation for a shadow play

VIRGINIA MADSEN

Department of Media, Division of Society, Culture, Media & Philosophy, Macquarie University, SydneyE-mail: virginia.madsen@scmp.mq.edu.au

Strategically placed with the right degree of persistence and

‘sympathetic vibration’, sound can reveal itself as a potentially

devastating force. As used against the Branch Davidian

religious sect in 1993 at Waco Texas, the FBI’s little

remembered ‘sonic assault’ – involving Tibetan monks in

prayer, dentist drills, and other bizarre recordings – arguably

contributed to the tragic denouement of events as they were

witnessed live on TV by millions around the world. The use of

sustained, high-pitched, loud or repetitive noises and music

added to an already incendiary narrative endgame, established

first by the sect but later supported by the media. This essay

draws on this tragic event, and later ‘forensic’ research

conducted by the author in the process of writing, scoring and

producing an audio performance work, Cantata of Fire.Specifically, it explores the way in which amplified ‘concrete’

sound and electronic ‘viral’ voices were used as a weapon at

Waco – materially, psychologically, theatrically and

‘diegetically’. And in the context of a much longer (and

repressed) history of sound as used in ‘theatres of war’ and

other conflicts, the author reconsiders the overlooked and

underestimated powers of sound, music and noise in an

age dominated by digital ‘real-time’ electronic media and

‘tele-visual’ surveillance.

And there appeared to them, tongues dispersed like fire.(Martin Luther)Behold I will bring evil upon this place,

the which whosoever heareth, his ears shall tingle.(Jeremiah 19:3)Stay indoors – There might be some noise. (Troopers,

Waco, Texas, TIME Magazine, 3 May 1993)1

On 28 February 1993, agents of the US Bureau ofAlcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) raided theheadquarters of the Branch Davidian religious sect ina compound on the outskirts of the town of Waco,Texas. The agents intended to confiscate weaponsthey believed the group had illegally stockpiled therein the belief that the Apocalypse was rapidly drawingnear. The raid was a failure; four ATF agents werekilled, and several sect members were wounded,including leader David Koresh. A stand-off ensuedbetween members of the sect behind the walls of theircompound and the Federal agents surrounding it.This turned rapidly into an ‘international media

event’ as agents, tanks, helicopters and federal law-enforcement personnel assembled at the scene, alongwith hundreds of journalists and television crews.Over the course of the 51 days of the siege – thelongest in US law enforcement history – authoritiesattempted to resolve the situation via telephone orloud hailer. They also employed other less conven-tional methods, blasting the compound with loud andexotic musics, sound effects, or harsh lights. At 6 a.m.on 19 April 1993, the decision was finally made tobreach the walls of the compound. In circumstancesof great confusion, and as millions of TV viewersaround the world watched in real-time, the buildinginhabited for so long by this group of outcasts wasconsumed by fire. Seventy-six sect members (twenty-five of them children) lost their lives in a blaze themedia later described as ‘of biblical proportions’(Byrnes 1999).

1. SOUNDING THE TRUMPETS

But no one was supposed to get hurt. ‘You are respon-sible for your own actions,’ agents called out. ‘Come out

now and you will not be harmed.’ ‘Do not fear what youare about to suffery Be faithful unto death, and I will giveyou the crown of life.’ (Gibbs 1993: 24)2

Late in the course of the siege at Waco Texas, I wasto discover a little commented upon fact: the agenciesinvolved in the crisis with the Branch Davidianshad made use of recorded sound as a physical andpsychological weapon. During the long nights ofseemingly featureless and uneventful waiting thatwere to characterise the siege until its final days, theFBI launched an arsenal of amplified sounds – in whatthey called a ‘sonic assault’3 – at the Davidians’compound. Combined with the use of harsh lights, inwhat could also be termed son et lumiere, the FBI

1Cited by Gibbs 1993: 22.

2Emphasis in Time.3Research conducted for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation(ABC) by Tara Libert (Washington Office). Libert spoke to FBIrepresentatives in Washington (Fax to Producer, Tony Mac-Gregor, 28 April 1993, ABC) who confirmed ‘the sonic assault’.The sonic assault (using sound and light) had limited media andpress coverage at the time, but is reported in various governmentdocuments (see note 4) and is briefly mentioned in a number ofdocumentaries dealing with the siege.

Organised Sound 14(1): 89–99 & 2009 Cambridge University Press. Printed in the United Kingdom. doi:10.1017/S1355771809000119

attempted to drive the inhabitants of the besiegedcommunity out into the open.4

‘This is not an assault!’ agent Byron Sage cried over theloudspeakers. ‘Do not shoot. We are not entering yourcompound.’ (Gibbs 1993: 23)

Some time soon after these events, I decided to writean audio performance piece based on what I had seen(and only partly heard) on television. I became fasci-nated by the use of this sonic assault (a theatrical andindeed musicalised event) and by the fact that very littlereportage had mentioned its use at the time – or forthat matter has commented upon it in any depth sincethe tragedy. As a context for the work that resultedfrom my increasing interest in this event, I was com-missioned as a composer and writer for the AustralianBroadcasting Corporation’s national audio arts radioprogramme, The Listening Room (1988–2003). I wasalso teaching new approaches to sound performance atthe University of Technology in Sydney, such thatduring the course of my research for the ABC I decidedto experiment with this ‘media event’, using it as thebasis for an extended sound performance workshop atthe university. Here my class was asked to participatein exploring new ways to approach such highly visible,although in this case less obviously audible, mediaevents – and from a musical, dramatic, sound arts andforensic perspective. The audio arts radiophonic ‘for-ensic theatre’ of Gregory Whitehead was an influencefor this kind of work, as was Steve Reich’s experimentssince the 1960s with ‘found sound’, including his use ofdocumentary sound and voice in a variety of musicaland music theatre works for stage, video and gallery. Itwas at this early stage too that I imagined the emergingpiece as a series of movements, with the narrative‘progressing’ through the use of sampled voices andperformers recorded in the studio to be arranged incantata form.

In my workshops, I asked students to play with keytextual fragments I’d collected from a variety of mediasources and to transform these into narrativised scored‘parts’. The class was then divided into three types of‘voice’: representing the authorities (FBI, military, andso on), the media (journalists and commentators) and acollective voice from ‘the inside’ (the women and meninside the Branch Davidian compound). At this stage Ihad not yet envisaged how I might employ the soundsof sonic assault; I had not yet established how thesemight form their own dark sound play in the shadowof media, or create a ‘signature tune’ for this ill-fatedbunch of outcasts. As the siege intensified, I contactedABC representatives in Washington requesting more

information, but only after conducting my workshopsand hearing the great potential in this event as a tragicplay of voices complete with something akin to a Greekchorus, did I finally write the ‘score’, aurally imaginingCantata of Fire.5

Actual voices of participants are used, but the script y

turns into a sort of Greek chorus, echoing a mountingmadness. By using sound and music in this way, the truefeelings of the people involved in the siege, both inside

and outside the walls, reverberates through you y

(Clarke 1993)

This story seemed a particularly compelling one tobe told with the radio. In many respects, the Waco‘narrative’ unfolded as a series of uniquely audioevents, even if the title also alerts us to the visualspectacle of fire and media which was all thatremained to see in the end. First and foremost Cantataof Fire was a listening (turned towards composition).In this listening, sound dominates, drawing us into theinterior of events in the hope of some epiphany. Nocamera image taken ‘from the outside’ could take us tothis place ‘inside’ the event, behind the walls, or allowus to hear, as those from the inside might haveexperienced it, the determining signature tune asplayed out before the Branch Davidians.

Along with millions of others I watched a good deal of

the Waco siege on television, but then I was a spectator.Cantata of Fire insists you become a participator.(Clarke 1993)

During the initial writing stage I also became con-vinced that this largely ‘overlooked’ and muted son etlumiere (with all its apocalyptic overtones) had beenhighly invasive, but in ways that were not so obvious tothe casual TV viewer. Invoking the ancient power ofsound as a weapon, this sonic assault appeared to carrywith it still living resonances from the history of war,and other more submerged and distant echoes from thebiblical Jericho:

And it shall come to pass, that when they make a long

blast with the rams horn, and when ye hear the sound of

4Details in United States House of Representatives Committee onGovernment Reform; House of Representatives Investigation intothe Activities of Federal Law Enforcement Agencies toward theBranch Davidians, Union Calendar No 395, 104th Congress, 2ndSession, 25 July 1996.

5A radiophonic music theatre work for 6 voices and ‘sonic assault’,written by Virginia Madsen and directed by Tony MacGregor. Co-produced by Madsen and MacGregor with technical production byJohn Jacobs for The Listening Room (ABC 1993). The singer MinaKanaridis performs a Sephardic lament for King David. Thechorus of women include Jenny Vuletic, Lucy Bell and DeborahPollard. ‘The Men from the Agency’ are played by Richard Mooreand Peter Carroll. Carroll also plays ‘The Man in the Submarine’.Cantata of Fire was commissioned by the Australian nationalpublic broadcaster and first broadcast on 30 August 1993. Subse-quently it was broadcast in the USA as part of the ‘New AmericanRadio’ series and in several European countries, with a German-language version produced by Barbara Schafer for BayerischerRundfunk in 1995. It is included in the New American RadioArchive (http://new-radio.org) and was performed at varioussound art and electronic media festivals, including in the publicprogramme of The Biennale of Sydney (2008) and for ABC RadioNational (July 2008).

90 Virginia Madsen

the trumpet, all the people shall shout with a greatshout; and the wall of the city shall fall down flat.

(Joshua, 6: 5)

Somewhere on the border between documentaryand fiction, theatre and musique concrete, my com-positional practice produced a ‘post-mortem’ play,itself a product of the performance process: a kind ofcritical auscultation or forensic reading of the wavesstill emanating from the site. In turn, Cantata of Firebecomes, here, a launching pad for this much laterreflection on what might be heard as a perverse ‘art ofsound’ employed as part of a theatre of war.

2. SON ET LUMIERE: GOING ALL THE WAY

TO THE ABYSS

MALE VOICE (1):At first they were respectful,

then the tone switched to disdain.MALE VOICES (1 & 2):We mocked him and beganour sound and light campaign.

(Cantata of Fire)

Although I know of no detailed historical studiesof this military usage and performance potential ofsound, music and noise, sound as weapon has a longhistory: of engagement, and of performance. Warringarmies and campaigns consistently and imaginativelyhave used to their advantage sounds and voices intheir arsenals. We might think of all those drums andtrumpets and bagpipes wafting over hill and moun-tain, fronting armies, heralding their own particularapocalypses. We might also recall the buzz bombs andaircraft designed by the Nazis and used during thecourse of the Second World War to inspire terror,amplifying an almost Godlike power that, in the formof a sonic assault, they too announced.6 These sonictraces have not yet been erased from living memory,and their screaming could be interpreted as heraldsof more terrifying forces to come. The screaming ofall kinds of voices and machines should be heardperhaps as one movement in the continued amplifi-cation and echoing of a whole array of sounds weknow from the historical record to have been orche-strated by this machine of war – with the Nazislaunching one of the most extravagant and terrifyingson et lumieres the world has yet witnessed.7 This son

et lumiere can still be recognised in the recordediconography of Hitler’s voice, which resounds notonly with his unmistakable fever-pitched delivery – asmediated and cultivated through loudspeaker andradio technology – but with the clamour of the crowdthat invariably accompanied it, acting as its approvingand ultimately destructive echo. According to AliceYaeger Kaplan, Hitler’s voice was what she called thefascist ‘triumph of Echo’, ‘not the despairing Echoof Greek myth, the Echo condemned to repeat thesentence endings of the beloved Narcissus. This is asuccessful Echo, jubilant in sharing Narcissus’s voice,strong in following, in imagining itself repeated, ratherthan repeating.’ This is also the echo of the dictator,literally ‘the one who speaks’ (Kaplan 1986: 8).

The writer Jacques Attali noted too that noise ‘in allcultures is associated with the idea of the weapon,blasphemy, plague’ (Attali 1985: 27). Historically,sound functions as more than sign or metaphor here.As Deleuze and Guattari have suggested, sound orga-nised and de-territorialised as ‘music (drums, trumpets)draws people and armies into a race that can go allthe way to the abyss (much more so than bannersand flags, which are paintings, means of classificationand rallying)’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 302). Theweapon of ‘sonic assault’ using all kinds of audiofrequencies and pre-recorded sound effects was notnew to this event either. Something similar had beendeployed in various international crises: during theVietnam War by American Forces; in 1980s Korea bystudent protestors; and against General Noriega duringthe 1989Panama crisis, part of what the US called its‘Just Cause’ Operation. A recent report of sound usedas a weapon comes from Israel.8

The power belongs to those who possess clock or siren,to the network of sound emitters. Even armies pourforth music in their wake. (Serres 1985: 114)9

Thus long before the final pounding of tear gasthat ultimately would precipitate the end for theBranch Davidians, an acoustic signature tune comingfrom a long history of sonic military theatre could bedetected, announcing in no uncertain terms whatwas nigh. Not quite the aural equivalent of a mirage,

6The Germans produced two rockets; the first was the V1, com-monly called the buzz bomb or flying bomb. They also created theStuka or Junker 87, which, as Virilio writes, ‘swept down on itstarget with a piercing screech designed to terrorize and paralyze theenemy. It was completely successful in this aim until the forces onthe ground eventually grew used to it’ (Virilio 1989: 6).7‘Finally, when the Fuhrer steps on the monumental altar, a hundredand fifty searchlights suddenly spring alight, raising over the Zep-pelinweise a cathedral of pillars a thousand feet high to test thesidereal significance of the mystery being celebrated y In the sign-saturated sky a storm is gathering which will be violent as an

(F’note continued)apocalypse, and which will engulf us all!’ This account of theNazi’s annual party congress in Nuremberg (Tournier 1983: 262) isbased on eyewitness accounts. See Schlor (1998: 282) and Virilio(1989: 55).8A sonic assault weapon, dubbed ‘The Scream’, was reported at aprotest by Palestinian and Jewish sympathisers against Israel’sWest Bank separation barrier in 2005. The vehicle-mounted devicereportedly emitted ‘bursts of sound’ using ‘a special frequency thattargets the inner ear’ and ‘leaves targets reeling with dizziness andnausea y potentially causing auditory damage with prolongedexposure’. In Associated Press 2005: 14.9‘[L]e pouvoir appartient a qui possede cloche ou sirene, au reseaudes emetteurs de son. Meme les armees faisaient defiler la musiquedevant elles’. Translation from French by the author.

Cantata of Fire 91

the hallucinatory tones of pre-recorded bugle calls –traditionally a call to arms – could be heard to echoacross that Texas plain and the increasingly confuseddivide between reality and its real-time electronic andvirtual substitute.

After reading reports produced after the tragedy,too, one’s impression had been unmistakably of aninvasion or war. This was regardless of comments fromauthorities attempting to divert media attention awayfrom their more unconventional strategies.10 AlanStone, MD Professor of Psychiatry and Law, Harvard,in presenting his report (1993) to the US Justice andTreasury Department regarding the handling of thesiege, described the sound/light assault as the ‘thirdphase of the standoff’. This saw the FBI engage (in hiswords) in a ‘more aggressive approach to negotiation’(Stone 1993: 7–13).11 Contradicting FBI official lan-guage, this approach, he said, was ‘all-out psycho-physiological warfare intended to stress and intimidatethe Branch Davidians’ inducing ‘mood disturbances,transient hallucinations and paranoid ideation’ in‘predisposed individuals’ (Stone 1993: 7–13).

3. SIGNAL TO NOISE

[N]oise y does not exist in itself, but only in relation to

the system within which it is inscribed: emitter, trans-mitter, receiver. (Attali 1985: 26–7)

The replay of specific sounds and musics could performin this situation then ‘strategically’ and ‘logistically’according to the type, intensity, duration and semioticdeployment of the sounds in the resonant field openedup by the principal and competing narratives: herebetween the authorities in charge of operations, themedia’s own storytelling, and sect members and theirleader David Koresh’s collective interpretation of ‘thesigns’. (You will hear in Sound example 5 from Cantataof Fire how these sounds can also be heard to becomefused and confused. Listen to the dentist drills, dis-tinguished most clearly in the early parts of the soundplay, which, by its close, recall air raid sirens and alsoscreams. Hear how the sound of the phone off thehook, through high volume and extreme distortion,becomes an alarm. Likewise, babies crying become awhole sea of infants in distress, their collective voices

merging with the sound of the dentists’ drills into oneextended nightmarish wail of high-pitched terror.)

Even as this bizarre array of sounds (and voices)became players in the unfolding drama being witnessedat Waco – and we will deal specifically with these soon– we should not assume their roles can be clearlydefined. Although we might predict certain outcomes,phenomenologically and semiotically speaking, thesesound effects and voice positions remain unstable intheir meanings. They slide between signal and noise. Inpart they do this because sounds – separated from avisible source, and released into the charged air, whichcould be said to surround Waco at this time – perform(in Pierre Schaeffer’s terms) as acousmatic events. Byacousmatic, Schaeffer meant those ‘sounds one hearswithout seeing their originating cause’.12

In his book on film sound, French sound designerand writer Michel Chion discussed the use of theacousmatic as a ‘dramatic technique in itself’ (Chion1994: 72). Sounds, which no longer can be sourced in acorresponding visible event – like the ones heard topenetrate the walls of the Davidians’ compound –become overtly dramatic: lacking in clarity throughdisconnection from their source, they are more open tothe power of suggestion. Their reception and inter-pretation moreover will be directly connected to thestate of the system into which they were (here, patho-logically) inserted. To some extent they are also liber-ated from the more bounded meanings imposed onthem by the visible presence of a source. Just as with thelittle, mostly unidentifiable, sounds we hear so acutelyin suspense-film (and horror) genres leading us intodanger, these sounds of assault likewise could be posi-tioned in such a way as to unsettle their intendedaudience. They are vectorised – to use one of culturalcritic Paul Virilio’s preferred terms – leading theiraudiences astray into a dark unknown, off-screen andbeyond the limits defined by the frame. These noisyghostly emissions deployed at Waco by governmentforces could function then as ‘voices’ – voices able toattach themselves parasitically to other bodies andorgans, summoning, possessing, calling out through thevoice of another. In terms of the narrative terrain I ammapping at Waco, these vectorised voices appear tohave been highly audible to those already pre-disposedto hearing their messages.

4. LISTENING TO THE PROPHETS OF BAAL

MALE VOICE (as if through loud hailer):

If you can’t see,walk toward the loudspeaker.(Cantata of Fire)

10Agent Byron Sage downplayed the sonic assault, explaining itwas to ‘keep them on guard, to keep them so they weren’t at a fine-honed edge’ Tara Libert (ABC). Libert also cited (FBI agent) JeffJamar: the music and loud noises were not ‘psychological warfare’but mere ‘sleep deprivation’.11Such a strategy needs to be understood in the context of the FBIoperation at the time, which by this ‘third phase’ (Stone 1993) wasunmistakably military in character. Stone tells us in the samereport, for example, that armoured vehicles were deployed in acircle around the compound, slowly ‘tightening the noose’ – to usethe FBI’s own terminology.

12The word is of Greek origin (Pythagoras), although theorised bythe principal exponent and founder of the French musique concretemovement, Pierre Schaeffer 1967. See Chion (1994: 71).

92 Virginia Madsen

According to a variety of reliable sources, includingeyewitness accounts, the FBI employed a curiousselection of sounds and music at either high volumeor repetitively over long periods – whilst also blastingthe inhabitants of Mt Carmel with light, or alternatelyswitching off their electricity so that the sounds mightbe received in darkness. While this happened, ‘nego-tiations’ through loud hailers added to the barrage.We should not underestimate the physical and

psychological effects of the material qualities of thesounds used here. This is crucial to any overallunderstanding of effect. A high-pitched (high-fre-quency) sound, for example, played over long dura-tion repeatedly and at high volume – in this obviouscontext of stress – is likely to contribute to the forceof its impact and extended effects upon the hearer. Ofsignificance here is the opinion that many of thesounds used were reportedly in the high-frequencyrange, and these sounds have the ability to cut to theheart through the denser overall sonic atmosphere.‘The screaming sounds of rabbits being slaughtered’is but one example. Not surprisingly I was unable tofind this sound listed in any of the standard effectscompilation CDs routinely used by film-makers, andTV and radio producers. This type of sound effect – ifindeed it was a ‘faithful’ rendition of an actual audioevent – was most plausibly recorded for its associa-tional impacts rather than as the ‘real thing’. It per-forms no doubt as yet another player in the trompel’oreille13 affected by high-fidelity audio, merelyinvoking the sound of rabbits being slaughtered, asone might aurally imagine them. Needless to say, asound like this, part of an arsenal, would also rely onits vectorial (and this is also a tending to the virtual)powers for impact. In other words, associationsrelated to this effect in its particular milieu mightbecome increasingly significant as they extended intoand over time – distress linked to the high-pitchedwhining whistling sound, similarities between thesesounds and a baby’s cry or even any helpless crea-ture’s squeals of pain. (There were many familiesinside the compound for whom these sounds wouldbe most affective). Listen now to Sound example 2,‘A Sign from God’.David Koresh played a role here too, sending out

messages on the winds and wires and via radio toanyone who might tune in to his ‘show’. A murmur ofcosmic proportions, in actuality and in effect, envel-oped the site of Waco, and this murmur pitched noiseagainst appearance, chaos against order, with alltribes proclaiming to speak in the name of Godand with the tongues of prophecy. As a propheticweapon, sound could be employed in this ‘theatre’of operations as much more than a representation.

Able to penetrate and vibrate walls, it remoulds anddestroys them in extreme circumstances.14 Sounds, inthe form of music or sound effects, are also endowedwith complex meanings, functioning as signs. Penetra-tion operates at both levels: at the level of sign and as amaterial force that literally touches or sets in motion.This penetration occurs directly on the physical planethat includes the neurological, but it also operates fromwithin the perspective of the psychological. It is in thislatter context that the penetration of the sonic beginsalso to operate within the frame or narrative spaceof the diegetic – that is, with reference to the ‘reality’fabricated by one’s placement in partiular narrativeworlds. From a physical and psychological ‘point oflistening’, therefore, the many unorthodox soundrecordings used against the Branch Davidians couldreveal a highly affective power, with the potential toinduce disintegration or dangerous ‘sympatheticvibration’. The double-edged motif of sympathetic yetdestructive vibration also moved to the centre of thesound performance Cantata of Fire as we hear voicesimitating and echoing one another, becoming fusedand confused in the mix between reality and fiction.Listen to Sound example 1, where we hear MinaKanaridis singing the recurring lament for KingDavid, and hear what becomes a refrain: ‘There arethings igniting even as we speak’.

On the symbolic level, and in order to assess thepossible impact of specific sounds used in the FBI’sarsenal, this confrontation must be considered within aframework of the construction of a particular narra-tive world and in terms of competing God-like voicesperforming on both sides of the divide. Koresh, self-appointed leader and prophet of the group, spoke ‘for’the others and to those not yet within his power,routinely delivering sermons in house and on theradio. His was a personal yet electronically distributedvoice contained within, and yet emanating from, thewalls of his church sited at ‘Mount Carmel’. ThroughTV and radio, Koresh’s words circulated widely asthey burned brightly for that short time in which themedia chose to fan them. And even as this church wasbuilt upon a flat prairie – a misnomer for those beyondits influence – for the Davidians this ‘mountain’ couldcome to exist powerfully on the symbolic plane, withall its particular psycho-religious overtones. Thisplace, this scene, recalled battles fought by the prophetElijah against ‘the prophets of Baal’ described in the

13Literally ‘trick of the ear’. A word play derived from trompe l’oeil.

14For example, take the extraordinary film footage of the collapseof the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, USA, on 7 November 1940,destroyed by ‘large amplitude resonance vibration’. The sequencedepicts an iron bridge played upon by a howling gale until its rigidstructure becomes plastic, the harmonic vibration of the structureturning to wild sine wave undulations until finally the bridge isflung apart by the ‘catastrophic torsional vibrations’. TeachingNotes to accompany the film (Sydney: Powerhouse Museum ofTechnology): cited in MacGregor (2000: 5).

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Old Testament. From the camera’s and outsiders’perspective, Mt Carmel would always be nothing morethan flat earth, a buckle at most to distinguish it, asmall shadow cast across an otherwise featurelesslandscape. For the Davidians, however, not only wasthis place their holy mountain, a refuge from the forcesof evil turning America (they believed) back into aprofane wilderness, it could also become the futurescene of a re-enactment – the spiritual plane broughtto earth, a new prophet once more before an oldenemy, the forces of Mammon or Baal.15 Here wemight understand a version of spirit speaking throughKoresh, who prophesied apocalyptic endings as writ-ten in the Bible. In Koresh’s voice (in the live radioreports as the FBI bullets rip through his stomach, forexample), we hear him crying out in pain, a sympa-thetic echo perhaps of the sacrificial and sufferingChrist as he endured the assaults of the Roman guardon Calvary. Listen to Sound example 4 (‘Possessed’),where we hear the mediatised voice of Koresh.

THE MAN IN THE SUBMARINE:It is always the same pictureday in day out, the same pictures.THE WOMEN:

And the winds blew driving them mad.They said, ‘stay indoors, there might be some noise.’(Cantata of Fire)

Voices became weapons in more ways than one inthis play between light and dark, on and off screen,obscurity and high definition. A voice representingthe State could be discerned, sounding out above andbeyond the other noises. This was a voice sure of itsmoral superiority and embodied in its agents. Herewas a voice given to conjuring and commanding,speaking in recognisable refrains: ‘If you can’t see;walk towards the loudspeaker. Follow the voice.’16

This collective, yet also singular, voice carried on thewinds and wires over loudspeaker, monitor and tel-ephone, could hail from the wilderness or promisedland depending upon your perspective. And in theunfolding narrative at Waco, it hardly requires amajor leap of the imagination to hypothesise that forthe Branch Davidians these same surrounding andthreatening government forces might be discerned as‘forces of evil’. Reports indicate Koresh describedgovernment agents at the time as ‘the Assyrians’(Smolowe 1993: 29). Within such a narrative foundation

– a context conditioned by a skewed and isolatedBiblical interpretation, which included Koresh’sreported ‘pathology’ manifest as a ‘control mania’17 –it is entirely plausible that the FBI be cast as foot-soldiers to a corrupt and heretic government. To thislegend and casting of performers, another voice couldbe heard to speak over and between these voices,another God-like actor who can always be calledupon to play mediator or Devil’s advocate. This voice,becoming legion (and enacting its own son et lumiere),reverberated with the words so often re-cited bymedia in their coverage of this tragedy and as repe-ated in Sound example 4 of Cantata of Fire: ‘We didnot introduce fire into this compound. We did notintroduce fire.’18

But how could forensically oriented performancetechniques, using sounds as concrete ‘sound objects’,assist us to hear this story ‘from the inside’, to effect ahermeneutic reading from auscultation? What mightwe hear in the dangerous sympathetic vibrationsbuilding in the play between opposing forces, andbetween voices pitched against one another at Waco?

5. PSYCHO-ACOUSTIC REFRAINS AND THE

RELEASE OF DEMONS

Much of the text created for Cantata of Fire derivedfrom media accounts – on TV, radio and print, incor-porating words from survivors, journalists and the FBI.From these I extracted and played with fragments ofever-reiterative media speech. Fragments of radio newsalso operated as ‘found sounds’ becoming, throughrepetition, almost concrete sound objects. The soundsof the FBI’s sonic assault, as I aurally re-imagined andre-performed them – presented in ‘loops’, changing induration, frequency, and intensity and quality of soundover the course of the piece – were designed to work onthe listener in a number of ways. At the same time asfunctioning musically, psycho-acoustically, semioticallyand concretely, they served to build dramatic and nar-rative sequences. Through a process of repetition,principally using the figure of the tape loop (a digita-lised sample was used in my case), I attempted to listenmore intensively to the sounds (or phrases) that I hadchosen to represent the FBI’s sonic assault. Trying tounderstand through mind and body how hugelyamplified walls of sound such as dentist drills, babieswailing, a telephone off the hook or ringing into thislong day’s journey into night might have actually

15A story not long after resounded in the Oklahoma City bombing.16As is common practice in the era of audio-visual virtual realityvia video and digital ‘windows’, the FBI agent commanding theoperation of the siege worked out of a remote command centre.This place, or submerged communication vehicle, was popularlyreferred to as ‘the submarine’. Jill Smolowe (1993: 29) wrote: ‘Ashort rumpled lawyer named Danny Coulson watched it all on aTV monitor from the ‘‘submarine’’, the FBI’s windowless com-mand centre in Washington y All Coulson could do was watch,and think about the children’.

17‘Unfortunately, those responsible for ultimate decision-making atWaco did not listen to those who understood the meaning andpsychological significance of David Koresh’s ‘‘mania.’’ Insteadthey tried to show him who was the ‘‘boss’’ ’. See Stone (1993).18These words, originally used by an FBI agent and included in theradio coverage, could be interpreted as coming from both gov-ernment forces and from the media who reported and echoed them.Source: ABC Archives, Australia.

94 Virginia Madsen

been received from the inside, I drew on PierreSchaeffer’s notion of ecoute reduite (literally a‘reduced listening’).As Schaeffer discovered, when a sound is played

and listened to repeatedly, its particular qualities andformal properties may be revealed in something like anobjective sense. From a phenomenological perspective,the sound becomes an object when more intenselyperceived in this way. Through repetition and thesevering of the sound phrase from its contextual con-tinuum, a reduction in the field of perception is effec-ted. According to Schaeffer, the listener becomesmore intensely aware of the objective qualities of thesound; apprehends the sound event in its concrete,now almost architectonic form.19 These found-soundobjects, when repeatedly performed and organised intomusical phrases or refrains (for Schaeffer this workwas also in a sense constructive) could reveal throughthe very process of repetition their other only half-submerged siren-like voices. Sonic feedback and decaywere important in this rendering, too, as they areproperties of the electronic repetition process. I recal-led Steve Reich’s early minimalist tape phase pieces.Experiments in Its Gonna Rain and Come Out (Reich1987) encouraged me to play with the repeated soundfragment – revealing a machinic ability to release otheronly barely submerged voices.20 Yet, unlike Reich’sunpredictable – and as he has said ‘mysterious’ –music-sound experiments (cited in Nyman 1999), Iwas working directly and consciously with narrativematerial and an outcome that was already known.Listen here to Sound example 3 (‘The Prophecy’),which opens Cantata of Fire. This is the first time inthe piece where we hear the samples of the sonicassault effects, and as they might have been selectedby the FBI. At this point they are plainly presented,almost ‘raw’, without the added accidentals that comewith repeated listening. In their unadulterated form,they may remind us of a prior ‘innocent’ or uncor-rupted state before their more intense deployment.

This is perhaps the last time we hear them as meresound effects.

But is it not the truth of the voice to be hallucinated?(Barthes 1985: 272)

There is perhaps also something of William Bur-roughs’ conception of the parasitic ‘viral’ voice in theauthorities’ recordings and verbal hailings via loud-speaker and telephone. I certainly reference this in myusage of the word ‘possessed’. For Burroughs a concrete‘demon word’ – literally and materially proliferating,invading and controlling bodies of all kinds via media –could constitute a very direct, although concealed, formof warfare.21 In his oral story-telling, Burroughs spokeof such sonic weaponry, imagining a new weapon of‘sympathetic vibration’ in The Job – which ‘magnifiedsound frequencies’ to shift ‘the battlefield to the internalarena of the body itself’ (Lydenberg 1992: 416, 417).22

Is it possible that something like Burroughs’ viraldemon-like voices and parasitic words were inoperation in this sonic assault? Although we may nothave been dealing with weapons inspired by paranoidcut-up artists, traces of a perverse sonic inscriptionare to be detected here and resounded in the systemthat appeared to mask them. By way of an explana-tion, Tibetan monks recorded in rounds of prayerwere played repeatedly at the Davidians during thesiege. A Washington Post staff writer was quoted inthe Tibetan Network News:

Tibetan chants rose across scrubby central Texas farmland

early today as federal officials intensified their psycholo-gical assault on an armed religious sect by broadcastingthrough loudspeakers the meditative prayers of monkswho follow the Dalai Lama. The droning mantra con-

tinued until 3 a.m. on a night when FBI negotiators alsobeamed intense spotlights into the windows of the BranchDavidian compound near here. (Schneider 1993)

While the sounds of some effects – babies crying,rabbits dying – appear to have an obvious material

19This practice essentially formed the basis of Schaeffer’s concep-tion of a musique concrete, invented as a term in 1948 and devel-oped as a practice in the 1940s and 1950s. The idea of the‘reduction’ was taken from the founder of phenomenology,Edmund Husserl.20Both pieces use the going-out of phase of two, and then multipleidentical tape loops of voices recorded as ‘found sounds’ off thestreet. In It’s Gonna Rain, a young black Pentecostal street preacherrepeats the title words – a fragment of a sermon: ‘the effect is a kindof controlled chaos, which may be appropriate to the subjectmatter – the end of the world’ (CD Notes in Reich 1987). In ComeOut, Daniel Hamm, wrongfully arrested for murder during theHarlem riots of 1964 and desperately trying to attract attention tothe violence inflicted on him by police, utters ‘I had to like open thebruise up and let some of the bruise blood come out to show them’(Reich 1987). Reich: ‘First the loop is in unison with itself. As itbegins to go out of phase a slowly increasing reverberation is heard.This gradually passes into a canon or round for two voices, thenfour voices and finally eight’ (Reich 1987): the ‘accidental’ soundsare then revealed via Reich’s machinic repetition process.

21William Burroughs’ and Brion Gysin’s cut-up techniques andexperiments with tape loops became a method to disturb and dis-locate those invading messages, ‘the word as a weapon of illusionand control’ (Lydenberg 1992: 410) as they sought out bodies andresonant spaces in the body – the head being only one of thesespaces. In Burroughs, according to Lydenberg, tape recorder cut-ups are a method of resistance; they ‘vibrate word and sound out ofthe body’ (Lydenberg 1992: 417). This is akin to a kind of exorcismof those possessing voices, internal and external, which manipulatethe social body as well as the individual one. (See Lydenberg 1992:409–37.)22In Wireless Imagination, Lydenberg (1992: 416) references TheJob: Interviews with William S. Burroughs (Burroughs 1970). InLydenberg’s description, Burroughs’ sound weapon could work‘directly on the internal organs. There is a rubbing between thevarious organs because of a sort of resonance. It provokes anirritation so intense that for hours afterwards any low-pitchedsound seems to echo through one’s body.’ Reportedly developed bythe US military, a weapon like this, ‘that will make internal organsresonate’, would have effects ranging ‘from discomfort to damageor death’ (Pasternak 1997: 4).

Cantata of Fire 95

and psychological profile, the effect and use of theseother sounds in the FBI’s repertoire appeared to bemore enigmatic. What can we make of the apparentlywholesome American pop group of the 1970s, TheCarpenters, who also were on the FBI’s ‘playlist’?Fronted by what many will remember as the angelicvoice of Karen Carpenter, the group was innocuousenough and still heard with regularity on golden hitsradio formats and shopping-mall PA systems.

What might these choices signify? Knowing thenarrative terrain in which the Waco drama founditself, a more hermeneutic reading might be produc-tive. Calling my attention as if from afar, KarenCarpenter’s characteristic angelic tones spoke to meas a symbol of purity and innocence. One might wellimagine the FBI offering Karen Carpenter’s voice asgift, as invitation to leave the darkness and come tothe light. Follow this voice, they might have sum-moned; if you don’t trust us, put your faith in heryBut her voice – a highly controlled, almost cool voice– might just as well have functioned as somethingother, something darker. For those inside their bun-ker, the Devil himself might be expected to speak insuch seductively simple and dissembling tones.

Roland Barthes has suggested that there is a directrelationship between a voice and a body – specifi-cally, the grain of the voice and the weight of thebody that is its resonator. Taking into account thefact that it was no longer any secret at the time thatKaren Carpenter had effectively starved herself todeath (she suffered from anorexia), what repressednoise might have been heard here in this redeploy-ment of a voice revealing (through its ‘grain’)23 abody already on the way to disappearance? Could themarks of death found in the punctum24 of Barthes’photographs also be discovered here – in this voicewith wings, as light as air, of Karen Carpenter?

Musical loop, ‘Close to You’, by The Carpenters,

(Audibly decaying over time, as if through tinny loud-speaker or telephone. Full volume. Feedback and acci-dental noises audibly ‘infecting’ the ‘purity’ of the

recording.)(Cantata of Fire)25

Perhaps the FBI’s usage was accidental – and thisaudio-graph emerging out of the FBI’s own obscuring

camera could claim to be an innocent, albeit mis-guided, usage. But what can innocence mean here – inthis specific narrative context, in the cultural and lis-tening context of this time and place in America? In the‘promised land’ or the ‘land of broken dreams’, thisvoice – at once so fragile and yet so highly polished –might have had the power to cut through the walls ofdarkness and, depending on which side of the wall youstood on, be received as an embodiment of safe passage(a guardian angel) or the perverse and monstrousmessenger who well reveals America’s hollowed-outvoice as it is perceived to be ‘possessed’ by demons.‘Isn’t belonging to this voice of no one, the same asbeing possessed’, the female chorus cries out in mysound-play (Sound example 4; ‘Possessed’), ‘like theprophets and saints always were?’ In this context oftumult, Carpenter’s voice might well be heard as a ‘pre-echo’ of disappearance: her disembodied heraldicmessage an invitation to shipwreck. The Carpenters atMount Carmel inserted into the son et lumiere duringthose long nights of parasitic and dissembling sound-play might have been misinterpreted in the darkspaces of aural hallucination (from the inside), andwith some degree of perversity. Emerging then fromthis Pandora’s box, Karen Carpenter’s voice nowresonates with a bitter bathos, her angelic tones takenas subterfuge falling from grace in the visible darkness.

6. SYMPATHETIC RESONANCES: SOUNDING

THE JERICHO EFFECT

In my response to this now symbolically markedterrain, figured and eventually torn apart by theeffects of sympathetic resonance, the FBI’s moreexotic offerings – the monks, for example – couldpenetrate those inside as heretical voices, the sacredchanting one more indicator of the presence of dis-sembling demons who advocate with forked tongues.For those keeping another flame burning for theirGod behind the walls of their sanctum sanctorum,these holy rounds might have provided more proof ofAmerica’s ‘possession’.26 We might imagine hearingin them a kind of bass or foundation track into whichthe other more profane voices were inserted. Butnone of these sounds played out in a theatre of waroperates in isolation, as we have seen, or on only oneplane.27 So it is possible to imagine the repressed

23‘The ‘‘grain’’ is the body in the singing voice, in the writing hand,in the performing limb’ (Barthes 1985: 276). ‘The ‘‘grain’’ of thevoice is not – or not only – its timbre; the signifying it affordscannot be better defined than by the friction between music andsomething else, which is the language (and not the message at all)’(Barthes 1985: 273).24‘[F]or punctum is also; sting, speck, cut, little hole – and also acast of the dice y that accident which pricks me, but also bruisesme y ’ (Barthes 2000: 27). For Barthes’ reference to death in thepunctum, see Barthes 2000: 31–3.25The voice of Karen Carpenter was never actually included in thesound play; its presence, where I wished it evoked, only persists as aresidue of memory and in the realm of aural hallucination.

26Howard Schneider (1993) also quotes a psychology professor atGeorgetown University (Rev. Daniel C. O’Connell), who said thatKoresh could just as easily have used the standoff to ‘reinforce withfollowers that they are being persecuted by officers of a decadentsociety’.27Another history and pathology is to be invoked here: the history(and stigmata) of the technologically disembodied voice, its glos-solalia, heavenly and diabolical, and its traffic with various kinds ofspiritualism and mysticism. This is a history that has accompaniedthe development of sound recording, playback and wireless trans-mission from its most early days – and not simply in the distant

96 Virginia Madsen

noise in Karen Carpenter’s apparent purity of voiceintermixing and sympathetically vibrating (to illeffect) with these other apparently extra-diegeticofferings from the FBI. In his Sympathetic Vibra-tions: Effecting sound histories, Tony MacGregordiscusses the story of Joshua and his crowd bringingdown the walls of Jericho with trumpets and shouts.He imagines the walls of Jericho to be undone byequally sympathetic vibrations:

The frequencies of the energy emitted by Joshua’s horde(from the regular impact of marching feet on hardenedearth, the sustained vibration of the horns, the culmi-

nating explosion of the unison shout) resonate with themolecular structure of stone and mortar. This is ofcourse not an impossible scenario. (MacGregor 2000: 5)

While invoking the Biblical story of Jericho, thiscantata of voices ‘released’ through intensive auditionor auscultation aimed to also explore the essentiallyinterpenetrating zone between the interior and theexterior brought into inflammatory contact through akind of friction or ‘energetics of information’.28 Soundand light – two interconnected but, in this mise-en-scene, incompatible speeds – were able to operate on thefault lines between what we might refer to as the realmsof media-induced virtuality and an actuality turned onits head. In this scenario, my score suggests that thefriction produced by these two affective forces cominginto contact was able to spark off a chain of events thatat first glance appeared to have been the fault of noone. Waco 1993 might usefully be understood as aninstance of Paul Virilio’s energetics of information. Thisis the energy carried and released in the speed of lighttransmission of images and sounds with potentiallycatastrophic effects. Following Virilio’s argument, theseevents can be understood to have been ignited by (andmade a logical consequence of) the media and FBI’sreal-time fusion and confusion of matter and energy,reality and fiction. In many respects, this play wascalled up from that other obscured side of the media’sapparent illumination. It marked the site of an intensivelistening, aiming to take heed not only of a repressedsoundtrack, but sound as it now interacts with therealm of the visible – and as it is ‘muted’ or even‘blocked’ by the media’s own obscuring camera.Perhaps more importantly, we are dealing not only with

the dominance of the visual via electronic vectors –which appear to offer us a transparent passage to thereal through continuous ‘high resolution’ – but with therealm of desire made visible, indeed palpable. I will tryto explain.

7. IMAGE BLOCK: ‘A PUBLIC OPINION-

GENERATED EFFORT’29

Virilio suggests that the sphere of the virtual isincreasingly impinging on the sphere of the actual. Inthe age of electronic media vision, virtual and realno longer stand in opposition to one another, ratherthey exist in a new relation.30 Virilio argues we areincreasingly being governed by a ‘paradoxical logic’that ‘emerges when the real-time image dominatesthe thing represented, real-time subsequently prevailingover real space, virtuality dominating actualityand turning the very concept of reality on its head’(Virilio 1994: 63).The virtual (from the Latin virtus,indicating potential) now tends, in Virilio’s termi-nology, towards the actual. The realm of the virtualthus can have actual effects, with the potential toalter the state of play in the real world.

Virilio names this new milieu the dromosphere. Thisis the sphere of speed in which a new kind of theatreof operations insinuates itself upon and begins toinhabit the real. This sphere is characterised not somuch by high-speed vehicular movement – planes,trains and automobiles – but by the real-time instantspeed of dispatch and delivery of images and sounds.Now transmitted at the speed of light via satellite andother digital technologies, sounds and images cansubstitute themselves for reality. As Virilio has sug-gested, we have become engaged in ‘[a] war of imagesand sounds rather than objects and things’ (Virilio1994: 70).

But how does this substitution impact upon us?With the development of technologies that enablereal-time transmission and reception of sound andimages, there is no longer any delay between dispatchand delivery, the ‘son-image’ (sound-image) performsas if it were the actual event, in a certain sense(through its speed) grafting itself onto perceivablereality. Pressing up against history – and in effect,piercing the real with its gaze – those on the receivingend of the ‘transmission’ (the audience) are able tocontribute a powerful and statistically devastatingvoice to the outcome of such events, rendered ‘tele-sized’ (as Virilio would have it) and happening inreal time. How should we measure, then, this potent

(F’note continued)past, but in rock and popular songs from the Beatles’ No. 9onwards. It is in the light of these histories that I attempt tointerpret these unearthly and, for some, alien voices of devotionhugely amplified into walls of sound.28Virilio has spoken of an ‘energetics of information’ in a numberof his books. For example, in Virilio (1993: 177–8) he describes:‘energie en image et en son, energie du tact et du contact a distance.Cette fusion/confusion telematique de l’energie et de l’informationlive y ’ and in Lost Dimension (1991: 95) he proposes: ‘If infor-matics – with its networks, memory banks and terminals – isactually a kind of energetics, an energy form y ’.

29Reported by Riley, Woodbury, Johnson and Shannon (1993: 40)citing Jack Zimmerman, lawyer representing two Branch Davidiansurvivors.30It could be argued that sound already operates in this fused/confused sphere as a virtual and actual phenomenon, a materialand immaterial force.

Cantata of Fire 97

off-screen voice? In sub-sonic vibrations? Or couldwe imagine a kind of pre-echo feedback rather thanany direct sound? Although hidden from view, this‘voice’ is of a crowd-in-absentia,31 and its parasiticmurmurings ‘broken down into millions of smallrooms’ (writes author Don De Lillo in Begley and Lillo1993), appeared to my thinking as deeply enmeshed inthe apocalyptic outcome as the other player/voices‘performing’ at Waco. Using Virilio’s critique of real-time media energetics this crowd’s voice could come tocontribute its force inadvertedly to what was alreadyan incendiary mix. Jack Zimmerman, a lawyer repre-senting two Branch Davidian survivors concurs withthis fusion/confusion trope for me when he describedWaco as ‘a public opinion-generated effort’.32

8. ONE MORE RETURN OF THE LOOP

We have harvested it is trueyBut why did all our fruits turn rotten and brown?What fell from the wicked moon last night?We have all become dry; and if fire fell upon us

we should scatter like ashes – yes, we have made wearyfire itself.(Cantata of Fire)33

Listen now to the final movement (Sound example 5:‘The Mystery’), which brings us full circle, returning usto the opening prophecy. Note how the singer in thefinale no longer sings the sephardic lament; rather,words and phrases from the sound play are sung infragments, although with the same melody as before.The ‘image’ I wished for here was one where the wordswithout narrative are all that remain; their story is nowexhausted, and they rise like ashes swirling, eddying inupdrafts of wind, the last remnants of a mystery thatimplicated all players. For fifty-one days the eyes ofmillions of spectators were upon Waco. This was a sitesubject to negative development before the media’s‘absent’ eye. For fifty-one days, the international newsmedia waited. For the TV cameras – hungry for lights,action, exposure – there was little to develop, little to beseen on the outside except the boarded-up whitebuilding on a treeless Texas plain. Images appeared tobe over-exposed – saturated with light and with thedesire for spectacle (the light of continuous live cover-age). This desire implicated the audience as player, notsimply as passive spectator. Exposure could lead tooverexposure. Images, sounds and stories could repeatthemselves, creating feedback loops, and dangerous

sympathetic vibrations. As the days dragged on, ten-sions built, not only were the officers growing weary, sotoo were audiences and media. In their paranoia, theBranch Davidians were not to know how time couldcatch up with them – that ‘the End’, their Apocalypse,could come at such speed, and so soon. They had dugin for the long duration, as if duration still counted.

WOMEN:And the winds blew, driving them mad

THE MAN IN THE SUBMARINE, WOMEN:I don’t recognize you. I don’t recognize this.Fire pours from your mouth

(Cantata of Fire)

In this obscuring camera, we as audiences saw onlymore light and more fire, a fascinating spectacle inwhich the abject reflection of ourselves in the asheswas all that remained. This was an old shadow playof fallen angels and mistaken messengers. This was‘closed circuit television’ excised of its multitude of(unheeded) vibrations. Here a theatre of phantomvoices, concealing a war fought with images andsounds, was taken to its logical conclusion.

REFERENCES

Attali, J. 1985. Noise: The political economy of music.Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Barthes, R. 1985. The Grain of the Voice, trans. R. Howard.In The Responsibility of Forms. New York: Hill andWang.

Barthes, R. 2000. Camera Lucida: Reflections on photo-

graphy. Trans. R. Howard. New York: Vintage.Begley, A. and Lillo, D. 1993. Don De Lillo, The Art of

Fiction. The Paris Review 128: 295–6.

Burroughs, W. with D. Odier. 1970. The Job: Interviewswith William S. Burroughs. New York: Grove Press.

Byrnes, P. 1999. Sydney Morning Herald. 14 January 1999, 9.Chion, M. 1994. Audio-Vision: Sound on screen. Trans.

C. Gorbman. New York and Chichester: ColumbiaUniversity Press.

Clarke, J.S. 1993. Review: Cantata of Fire. The Age

[Melbourne], 26 August.Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus:

Capitalism and schizophrenia. Trans. B. Massumi. Min-

neapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Gibbs, N. 1993. TIME (Australian Edition). 3 May.Kaplan, A.Y. 1986. Reproductions of Banality: Fascism,

literature, and French intellectual life. Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press.

Lydenberg, R. 1992. Sound Identity Fading Out: WilliamBurroughs’ Tape Experiments. In D. Kahn and G.

Whitehead (eds.) Wireless Imagination. Cambridge,MA, and London: MIT Press, 409–37.

MacGregor, A. 2000. Sympathetic Vibrations. Unpublished

MA thesis, University of Technology (UTS), Sydney.Nietzche, F. 1988. Thus Spake Zarathustra. Trans. R.J.

Hollingdale. London: Penguin Books.

Nyman, M. 1999. Experimental Music: Cage and beyond(2nd edn). Cambridge and New York: CambridgeUniversity Press.

31‘From the town, as theatre of human activity with its church-square and marketplace bustling with so many present actors andspectators, to CINECITTA and then TELECITTA, bustling withabsent tele-viewers’ (Virilio 1994: 65).32Reported by Riley et al. 1993: 40, and included in the score.33This is a quotation taken from Friedrich Nietzche (1988: 155–6),which appears in The Prophecy (Sound example 3).

98 Virginia Madsen

Pasternak, D. 1997. The Pentagon’s Quest for Non LethalWeapons. http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/970707/

7weir.htm (accessed 5 June 2005).Reich, S. 1987. Steve Reich Early Works [Audio CD].

Elektra Nonesuch.

Riley, M., Woodbury, R., Johnson, J. and Shannon, E.1993. ‘Oh, My God, They’re Killing Themselves’ – FBIagent Bob Ricks. TIME. 3 May 1993, 22–41.

Schlor, J. 1998. Nights in the Big City: Paris, Berlin,London, 1840–1930. London: Reaktion Books.

Schneider, H. 1993. Tibetan Chants Are Latest WacoWeapon. Tibetan Network News. 23 March.

Serres, M. 1985. Les cinq sens. Paris: Grasset.Associated Press. 2005. Settlers Face Sound Assault. The

Australian. 11–12 June, 14.

Smolowe, J. 1993. Feb. 28 Sent into a Deathtrap? TimeMagazine. 3 May, 29.

Stone, A.A. 1993. Report and Recommendations Concerningthe Handling of Incidents Such As the Branch DavidianStandoff in Waco Texas to Deputy Attorney General Philip

Heymann (Nov. 10, 1993). http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/waco/stonerpt.html (accessed 9 December 2008).

Tournier, M. 1983. The Erl-King. Trans. B. Bray. London:

Methuen.Virilio, P. 1989. War and Cinema: The logistics of percep-

tion. London and New York: Verso.Virilio, P. 1991. The Lost Dimension. New York: Semiotext(e).

Virilio, P. 1993. L’art du moteur. Paris: Editions Galilee.Virilio, P. 1994. The Vision Machine. Bloomington: Indiana

University Press.

Cantata of Fire 99

The Icebreaker: Soundscape works aseveryday sound art

OWEN CHAPMAN

Department of Communication Studies, Concordia University, 7141 Sherbrooke Street West, CJ 3.230, 3rd Floor, Montreal, Quebec,Canada H4B 1R6E-mail: chapman.owen@gmail.com

The following discusses the potential of soundscape work

to reveal new aspects of our everyday aural environments.

Openness to the voice(s) of one’s sonic surroundings is

maintained as a hallmark of soundscape works, and also

a key component of sound art more generally. Different

perspectives and questions are articulated, with a consistent

focus on the variety of spaces engaged by both sound(scape)

artists and listeners. A case study is presented – a recently

initiated sound art project on the part of the author entitled

The Icebreaker. The latter is a musical instrument,

performance piece and interactive installation made from

piezo microphones and ice. Prepared compositions, including

soundscape works, are diffused at different moments when

one ‘plays’ The Icebreaker. I describe this emergent work as

an example of the sort of considerations and negotiations that

are at the heart of soundscape/sound art composition. My

aim is to demonstrate how sound artworks bring us to attend

to sounds we formerly failed to notice, revealing our own

reactions to these stimuli at the same time.

1. INTRODUCTION

The following discusses the potential of soundscapework to reveal new aspects of our everyday auralenvironments. Openness to the voice(s) of one’s sonicsurroundings is maintained as a hallmark of sounds-cape works, and also a key component of sound artmore generally. Different perspectives and questionsare articulated, with a consistent focus on the varietyof spaces engaged by both sound(scape) artists andlisteners. A case study is presented – a recently initi-ated sound art project on the part of the author enti-tled The Icebreaker. The latter is a musical instrument,performance piece and interactive installation madefrom piezo microphones frozen into different pieces ofice (figure 1). Prepared compositions, includingsoundscape works, are diffused at different momentswhen one ‘plays’ The Icebreaker. I describe thisemergent work as an example of the sort of con-siderations and negotiations that are at the heart ofsoundscape/sound art composition.Deliberate re-presentations of specific sounds or

sound recordings within works such as soundscapepieces draw us to attend to our mental reactions tothese stimuli. This is often a surprising experience,

such as when soft sounds that contribute to thebabble of an everyday environment are recorded,amplified and placed front and centre in a mix.Similarities and differences from one’s own experi-ences are highlighted. Attention is drawn to thesoundscapes we come into contact with every day.

We are at the centre of our own shifting sounds-cape in terms of aural perspective – however, theperimeter of this zone overlaps with many otherspaces, both public and private. There are also manypoints of reference within each zone, as soundscapestudies ask us to consider relationships to everysound that we can possibly attend to. Microphonesand amplification enhance this capacity. Soundscapecomposition involves making field recordings withportable equipment (sometimes referred to as ‘sound-walks’). These samples are then edited, processed andmixed into evocative new works that communicate thefeelings stirred in the recordist (both in the field andafterwards in the studio) as well as a sense of wherethese affective responses took place.1

The creative instincts (and skill) of the soundscapecomposer are present even in seemingly simple pre-production choices such as deciding where to walkand point a microphone. These constitute the first ofmany acts of mixing through listening for thesoundscape artist. With The Icebreaker, the micro-phones are placed inside the ice I use. This is a dif-ferent type of ‘field recording’, involving a differenttype of listening from the ‘soundwalking’ practicespromoted by the World Soundscape Project andother soundscape initiatives. A space is created by thework that promotes listening to sounds that are wellknown to those living in countries that experience sub-zero winters, or who cool their drinks with ice cubes.These everyday sounds are often heard, but rarely lis-tened to (where ‘listening’ is understood as a type ofaffective–reflexive practice). The Icebreaker is at once

1For information on my own audio art practice, please visit http://opositive.ca. For information on a soundscape research projectaround the Lachine Canal (Montreal, QC Canada) directed byAndra McCartney in which I participated, please visit the ‘LachineCanal: Journees sonores’ project website at http://s171907168.onlinehome.us/andrasound/lachine/.

Organised Sound 14(1): 83–88 & 2009 Cambridge University Press. Printed in the United Kingdom. doi:10.1017/S1355771809000120

constrained by its environment (indoor/outdoor,summer/winter, and so on) at the same time as itexceeds it through evoking other landscapes and/oreveryday experiences of ice and water. The practicesof environmental listening employed and promotedin the work resonate with the listening strategiesof soundscape studies (Westerkamp 2002; Arkette2004; McCartney 2004; Helmi 2006) as well asother articulations such as Goldstein’s holistic lis-tening (1988) and Ratcliffe’s rhetorical listening(1999).

Making sense out of immediate experience is oftena process that is unconscious. Ideas, concepts andmemories are evoked by the sounds we encountergoing about our lives. Attending to this activityallows one to reflect on the ephemeral foundations ofour subjectivity. Sound artists are intimately familiarwith this process of becoming more self-awarethrough listening at the same time as they acknowl-edge the deep impact our sonic environment has onour sense of self in any given moment.

Articulating this double potential offered by lis-tening is key in raising awareness around the com-plexities of our modern soundscapes (as Westerkamp,Schafer and other members of the World SoundscapeProject have demonstrated). Soundscape workscomposed from soundwalk or other field recordingsdemonstrate the capacity for ‘revealing’ within soundart through calling listeners to think about what they

might have heard but not listened to in their owneveryday aural environments.

Soundscape work without the journey into the innerworld of listening is devoid of meaning. Listening as atotality is what gives soundscape work its depth, from

the external to the internal, seeking information aboutthe whole spectrum of sound and its meanings, fromnoise to silence to sacred. (Westerkamp 2003: 121)

Crafting such self-reflexive experiences for anaudience requires a familiarity with being surprisedby sounds and what they call forth from one’s self.This familiarity is bred through journeys into innerworlds of listening on the part of the sound(scape)artist, enabled through practices of recording andcollecting sounds with an ear towards future works.One gathers sounds with an intuition as to what theymight reveal when placed into new mixes. With thisethos in mind, I turn now to a more detailed accountof The Icebreaker project before coming back to awider discussion of the nature of this ‘revealing’within soundscape and sound art practice.

2. THE ICEBREAKER PROJECT DESCRIPTION

I began working on The Icebreaker in February2007.2 This work can be described as a new musicalinstrument, sound installation and performance piecederived from frozen water and piezo microphones.The work enables the broadcast of a surprisinglylarge palette of sounds. Possibilities range from tonescreated by tapping the instrument’s various surfaces,to subtle drips as the ice begins to melt. Differentsizes of ice are used, as well as different objects withwhich to strike the ice, resulting in a sophisticatedpercussive instrument. The frozen microphones arealso sensitive to static charges delivered throughtouching the ice with skin or metal. Output from themicrophones can be passed through an array ofeffects pedals before being sent to speakers. Thesesounds can also be combined with prepared record-ings, including soundscape pieces. Elements of TheIcebreaker are modular and easily located in closeproximity and/or at a distance from one another,allowing for different possibilities in terms of how theinstallation inhabits material and sonic architectures.

Initial ideas were developed and tested at home.Piezo mics were wrapped in plastic and then frozeninto ice-cube trays filled with water. The resultingdevices ceased to pick up ambient air vibrations,

Figure 1. The Icebreaker.

2For images, video, audio and text regarding The Icebreaker pro-ject, please visit http://icebreaker.opositive.ca. This initiative wasstarted in February 2007 and has received support from theCanada Council for the Arts, Concordia University’s Faculty ofArts and Science (Montreal), Carleton University’s ArchitectureDepartment (Ottawa) and the Senselab/Societe des arts technolo-giques (Montreal).

84 Owen Chapman

perhaps unsurprisingly. But the mics were extremelysensitive to any percussive and/or touch-based inter-actions with the ice, resonating with a lovely ‘ping’when tapped. They were also nearly invulnerable tofeedback. This moment of discovery was reminiscent,for me, of previous soundwalking experiences andjourneys through inner worlds of listening and intui-tion as described by Westerkamp above. Placing micsin unusual places is a habit I developed throughworking on soundwalking/soundscape projects. I dothis because I know it can result in the recording ofinteresting sounds that I otherwise never would havenoticed.The audio fidelity of The Icebreaker’s piezo mics is

not superb. This compromise, however, is essential,as the piezos are small and easily integrated intodifferent pieces of ice without affecting the percussiveresonance of these shapes. They are waterproof-ableand can withstand strong amounts of pressure whenfrozen, struck, stepped on, and so forth. Lastly, pie-zos can be used to playback sounds instead of actingas microphones. While volume levels are not veryloud, hanging pieces of ice can act as micro-speakers,inviting an audience to approach and touch aninstalled version of The Icebreaker, physicallymanipulating its hidden sounds.This basic research was shared with various artists

and groups over the past year and a half throughdedicated research residencies, one-on-one work-shops and studio visits. The current design of TheIcebreaker incorporates over 12 pieces of amplifiedice and can be run entirely off a 12-volt batterythrough the use of a converted car stereo. Crystal-clear audio fidelity is not essential in terms of thissystem, since the frozen piezos have a limited range offrequency and amplitude. This configuration canthen be multiplied (2, 3, 4 timesy) in order to createa surround-sound installation. The design is entirelyportable and useful for a variety of different perfor-mance contexts (both indoor and outdoor). It alsoallows any given performance of The Icebreaker tooccur without depending on the power grid. Thesystem is unbalanced from the point of view ofgrounding, meaning that a/c hum is a constant threat.Battery power eliminates this issue (although directinput boxes with ‘ground lift’ settings often workwhen plugging into PA systems or recording devices).The 12-volt battery can also be charged using inex-pensive solar panels, an act that points to some ofthe wider environmental concerns addressed by theproject. These have to do with investigating theparadoxes of technologically based artistic responsesto our society’s over-consumption of industriallyproduced electricity and the impact this has on globalbalances of ice and water.Ice was also chosen for the production of sonic

events in order to evoke a feeling of transition from

one state to another – highlighting the compelling-ness of rhythms derived through natural events (suchas the beat provided by dripping water). Ice feelssolid, until its constantly shifting nature is revealed asit melts in our hands or before our eyes. For audi-ences and players of The Icebreaker, this shift alsoregisters with their ears. Ice has many possibilities fordifferent shapes that themselves promote differentstyles of interaction. It also represents a particularlyCanadian sonic material. If nothing else, the coldCanadian winter climate provides possibilities forvery large or numerous ‘ice microphones’ to be builtwithout resorting to indoor refrigeration (althoughthe latter can be used tactically during other seasons).

The ‘ice mics’ can be used in a variety of ways forsound art performance – both ‘live’ and in the studio.One method involves freezing a mic into a thin sheetof ice. I can then rap on the ice, making swirling,skating-like sounds, and so on. But I can also push onthe ice with my foot and eventually stand on top of it,creating very intense squeaking and cracking noises.Attempting to achieve silence becomes an interestingdemonstration of the futility of trying to stand still.Movie example 1 – ‘Frozen Puddle’ – shows a semi-choreographed moment with this component of TheIcebreaker, where the ‘voice of the ice’ (as some havecalled it) makes itself heard.3

Another platform is called the ‘Ice Xylophone’. Itis the most evocative, but also quite prone to unan-ticipated behaviour. The amount of dissolved air inthe water used for freezing, for instance, dramaticallyaffects how the ice responds percussively; the fre-quency and timbre of each piece is a result of thisdensity, combined with the shape and size of the ice,how it is set (e.g. hanging or on the floor), how long ithas been left to melt and crack, and so on. The icexylophone uses ice mics shaped into different lengthsof hanging cylinder. The pieces are hung in hard–to-reach places so that one’s whole body must beused to play the instrument, causing the ice compo-nents to sway around, sometimes smashing together.Short circuits, however, can become happy accidents(Movie example 2 – ‘The Ice Xylophone’).

Sharing this technology with other sound makershas been particularly rewarding in terms of impro-visations. Sound example 1 represents one suchmoment, with myself on the Ice Xylophone, SuzanneBinet-Audet on the ondes martenot, Kareya Audeton laptop and David Madden on guitar. This excerptwas selected from a series of improvisations recorded

3Performer: Owen Chapman, Choreography: George Stamos,Additional Sound Design: Anna Friz, Lighting Design: Yvan Caza-bon, Video Editing: Laura Cohen. This excerpt was selected fromdocumentation footage recorded on 8 May 2008 during a researchresidency in the Carleton University Architecture Department inOttawa, Canada. This information also applies to ‘Movie example 2’below.

The Icebreaker 85

live to two-inch tape on 29 June 2008 at the hotel2-tango recording studio, Montreal Canada (soundengineer: Howard Bilerman).

What The Icebreaker presents to both performerand audience is familiar and yet unexpected. It stirsup mental responses in the moment as well as laterwhen walking over icy landscapes – breaking throughour tendency to hear as opposed to listen to the dif-ferent voices of our surroundings. The squeak of icebeneath our feet when crossing a frozen puddle inearly winter – this is a sound many of us have heardand can imagine (especially in Canada), but fail tonotice in the everyday. It can be very aggressive,almost painful when amplified – but at the same timesurprisingly comforting, as though a type of Fou-caultian ‘savoir’ or deep, unconscious knowledgewere being confirmed. This unconscious ‘knowing’ isat the root of our experience of the everyday.

This highlighting of unconciously registered soundsis hardly unique to The Icebreaker, of course. In termsof Canadian artists, Matt Rogalsky’s work 2 minutesand 50 seconds silence (for the USA) uses small soundsderived from a speech by George W. Bush on 17March 2003. The result is a composition made fromthe spaces in between Bush’s words (Rogalsky 2005).When asked what sound sources she generally workswith, sound artist and composer [sic] (Jennifer Morris)replies ‘Right now it’s bass, guitar, koto, and thesounds that I hear inside and outdoors. Even if they arenot heard by the human ear, I try to figure out ways tocapture them, with a pickup and such’ (Chapman 2007:237).4 And as Wende Bartley suggests in the liner notesto her 1992 work ‘Icebreak’ (a piece created throughprocessing recordings of short improvisations withparts of the Javanese court-style gamelan at SimonFraser University, from her claire-voie CD released onthe ‘empreintes DIGITALes’ label in 1994): ‘Icebreaking, melting, dissolving into water. An infinitesound language full of shape, movement, and texture.Where are the stories buried in the rivers, creeks, gla-ciers, and canyons? Stories that formed this land wenow call home.’

David Byrne’s recent work Playing the Buildingalso exemplifies two emerging priorities for The Ice-breaker – that it be playable by anyone and createsounds in surprising ways without the use of digtalaudio technology.5 Alan Kaprow’s 1967 piece Fluidsshares a similar everyday ethos. Kaprow gatheredtogether volunteers for the project by posting thescore for the ‘happening’ throughout Los Angelesand Pasadena: ‘During three days, about twentyrectangular enclosures of ice blocks (measuring about30 feet long, 10 wide and 8 high) are built throughout

the city. Their walls are unbroken. They are left tomelt’ (Kaprow 2006).6

In terms of sound art precedents that employ iceand microphones, both Westerkamp and McCartneyhave published soundscape works that feature fieldrecordings of ice.7 I have also found traces of twoother recent works, but have not yet heard theserecordings. The first is a piece entitled rec01 by ColinOlan (released in 2003 on a label named ‘apestaartje’from New York). This work was made by placingtwo contact microphones inside a 1000 by 1000 block ofice, submerging the ice in water and recording theresult. In the words of music critic Peter Marsh: ‘Olan’scontact mics unlock a soundworld previously hiddenfrom the ear, where tiny events are magnified to dra-matic scale’ (Marsh 2002). The second ice-specificsound work is by Peter Cusack and is entitled BaikalIce (Spring 2003). The work is an aural document ofthe spring ice break-up at Lake Baikal – the world’slargest freshwater lake, located in Siberia, Russia.

3. AUDIO ‘TECHN �E’

‘Technology’, claims Heidegger, stems from the Greekword ‘techn�e’, and refers not only to craft, but also toartistic creation. ‘Techn�e y belongs to bringing-forth,to poiesis; it is something poietic’ (Heidegger 1977: 13).By making choices and gathering certain types of thingsover others, I show that I am at home in my work. As abringing forth or revealing, however, techn�e involvesrecognising that moments of linking – of unifying whathas been gathered – are often unpredictable. Outcomesrarely end up how we expect them. This is the challengeof juxtaposing different ontologies, of articulating themthrough mixing and spontaneous creation. It is thechallenge of knowing what objects to gather together inadvance according to an intuition as to what can bebrought forth through their combination. In developinga collection, control is only sometimes part of theagenda. An attitude is adopted towards ‘objects whichdoes not emphasize their functional, utilitarian value –that is, their usefulness – but studies and loves them asthe scene, the stage, of their fate’ (Benjamin 1969: 160).

Do works that exist only as recordings or perfor-mances count as ‘sound art’? This must be the case ifone is to include soundscape work within the genre.Combining Heidegger and Benjamin’s points of viewprovides a non-partisan way to recognise sound art: it

4Please see also http://squirrelgirl.net.5Please see http://davidbyrne.com/art/art_projects/playing_the_building/index.php.

6This happening was recently recreated in April 2008 by the LosAngeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in conjunction with theexhibition Allan Kaprow – Art As Life presented at the LAMuseumof Contemporary Art (MOCA). Please see http://www.lacma.org/art/ExhibFluids.aspx. Kaprow (2006) also documents a 2005remounting of the piece in Basel Switzerland.7Westerkamp, ‘Contours of Silence’, from 1994’s Radio RethinkCD (Banff: Walter Phillips Gallery) and McCartney, Les Soupirs deGlace (see http://facs-newmedia.finearts.yorku.ca/andra/phare/ice.html), composed in 2000.

86 Owen Chapman

is about working with technology to gather togethersounds for a combined revealing. Sound is part ofour everyday life as a hybrid of the material and theimagined. Experiencing sound means letting it go inthe very instant it is apprehended. Sound(scape) artistsplay with this moment as an instant of becoming onthe part of a listener – a moment where all previousmemories can be awakened, revalued and re-prioritisedas reminiscences. This awareness is at the heart of thesoundscape research spearheaded by Westerkamp,McCartney, Arkette, Schafer, Truax and others. AsMcCartney states regarding soundwalking (her pre-ferred method of field recording before subsequentsoundscape compositional work),

A soundwalker’s engagement with the landscape is atonce sonic, tactile, and kinaesthetic. It is defined throughwhat is heard of others’ sounds, through interactions with

the surroundings, and by the recordist’s own movements.Amplification translates the subtlety of touch into anaudible play with surfaces and textures. In soundscape

works, traces of tactility are embedded that help to linkdistant and everyday places. They explore auditoryexperiences and memories of natural and urban environ-ments, and attend to and reflect upon the depth of daily

rituals. (McCartney 2004: 185)

It is via this attention paid to daily rituals that thecommunity of sound art makes one of its strongestrecommendations to other disciplines of inquiry andexpression. This has to do with recognising thateveryday spaces connected by concepts such as ‘thesoundscape’ involve social, environmental and per-sonal networks. Sound is like a river we all dive intoas we wake in the morning. Sound waves connectbodies, places and minds. This is sound’s ‘tactility’ –it provides contact points where our sense of self canbe recognised as partially socially constructed. The‘otherness’ of our environment, the suggestion thatwe somehow exist independently from it, is destabi-lised. This is what the microphone helps to reveal.This is one of the discoveries enabled by The Ice-breaker – both for myself and its audience.The piezo mics arrested in The Icebreaker’s various

surfaces provide mechanisms for amplifying and lis-tening to formerly unnoticed sorts of sounds. But thetechnology does more than simply enable the ‘voiceof the ice’ to speak – it provides a means for inter-action and manipulation (through percussive possi-bilities and sound effects, panning, volume control,and so forth). The piezos do not reproduce all fre-quencies equally; the amplifier, speakers, wires andeffects boxes all add their own colouration to the mixalong with the ice. Listening and reacting to thesenuances is reminiscent, for me, to time spent fieldrecording and doing soundscape work, where open-ness to the touch of sound and the babble of one’senvironment are keys to discovering what can berevealed through one’s own sound art.

4. CONCLUDING QUESTIONS

When my colleagues in the field of cold-water engi-

neering speak of ‘ice-infested waters’, I am tempted tothink of ‘rig-infested oceans’. (Franklin 1992: 124)

How does sound art draw from the everyday? Howdoes it give back to this same wellspring? Franklin’sstatement above provides a clue – it is through pro-moting a similar inversion of our attitudes aroundtechnology that sound art, and in particular sounds-cape work, can contribute to changing our everydayhabits of failing to listen to what surrounds us. Thesocial implications of sound art stem from its potentialto reveal innumerable further possibilities for revealingwithin the different spaces of our shared sonic environ-ments, both technologically enabled and elemental.

I’d like to close with an image to juxtapose againstFranklin’s. Two years ago I bought a kite for my thenthree-year-old daughter – which was perhaps a bitambitious. We were on a family trip in Norway andwere looking for a new form of distraction down bythe fjord. She had fun with the kite, but I was actuallythe one who played with it the most as she moved onto other, easier pastimes. It occurred to me that thereis something similar to kite flying and the way I workwith sound. Simply put, the joy of flying a kite has todo with setting up the equipment, and then letting itgo. One plays with the kite, but it is at a distance, andwhat one does to the kite through controlling thestring is rather limited compared with what the kite isdoing in concert with the wind. My experiencedeveloping The Icebreaker has been similar. Thenoisy short-circuit moments contained in Movie

example 2 (‘The Ice Xylophone’) demonstrate thiswell. This sort of happy accident is central to per-formance, composition and installation techniquesthat employ improvisation and/or chance, as well asan important component in musique concrete andmodern electroacoustic music of many sorts. Thereare, of course, many examples of sound artworks thatchampion strict control. However, in what might bedescribed as the findings of The Icebreaker researchup to this point, I have noted that the overridingpursuit of such control deeply affects how a soundartwork will be constructed, and what type of revealingwill be enabled. Technology provides different ways tolisten to what we formerly simply heard, or perhapswere even unable to hear (such as sounds from theinside of a block of ice). It also affords possibilities fornearly infinite refinements and modulations of suchsounds. This is where the question of how much con-trol to exert comes to the fore – which is also a questionabout audience and how one would like one’s work tobe received. The precedent set by most, if not all,soundscape work has been to leave ample room for thevoices of the sounds one is working with, as well as theinterpretive capacity of one’s audience.

The Icebreaker 87

Sound art is recognisable as such through attend-ing to the revealing it enables. Whether drawn fromour shared, everyday soundscapes through fieldrecording and/or created via other audio technolo-gies, the gathering of sounds described above as acentral practice of sound(scape) art challenges lis-teners to continue listening long after they have left awork behind. Projects like The Icebreaker that workwith listening methods and aural concerns drawnfrom soundscape studies demonstrate the continuedresonance of the central questions addressed by thisimportant genre of sound art.

REFERENCES

Arkette, S. 2004. Sounds Like City. Theory, Culture andSociety 21(1): 159–68.

Benjamin, W. 1969. On Unpacking My Library: A talkabout book collecting. In Illuminations. New York:

Shocken, 59–67.Chapman, O. 2007. Selected Sounds: A collective investigation

into the practice of sample-based music. PhD Dissertation

in Communication Studies, Concordia University.Franklin, U. 1992. The Real World of Technology. Con-

cord, ON: House of Anansi Press Limited.

Goldstein, M. 1988. Sounding the Full Circle (concerningimprovisation and other related matters). Sheffield, VT:M. Goldstein.

Heidegger, M. 1977. The Question Concerning Technology.In The Question Concerning Technology and Other

Essays. New York: Harper and Row, 3–35.Helmi, J. 2006. One Hundred Finnish Soundscapes?

Exploring the Feelings of Safety, Soundscape and Lived

Space in Sonic Memories. In The West Meets the East inAcoustic Ecology. Hirosaki: Japanese Association forSound Ecology, 70–83.

Kaprow, A. 2006. Fluids. New York: Distributed ArtPublishers.

Marsh, P. 2002. Album review of REC01 by Colin Olan.http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/release/xcjw/ (accessed 15

September 2008).McCartney, A. 2004. Soundscape Works, Listening, and

the Touch of Sound. In Aural Cultures. Toronto: YYZ

Books, 179–85.Ratcliffe, K. 1999. Rhetorical Listening: A Trope for

Interpretive Invention and a ‘Code of Cross-Cultural

Conduct’. College Composition and Communication51(2): 195–224.

Rogalsky, M. 2005. 2 minutes and 50 seconds silence (for

the USA). [Audio piece with attached artist statement.]Public: art, culture, ideas (Digipopo edition) 31: 8.

Westerkamp, H. 2002. Linking Soundscape Compositionand Acoustic Ecology. Organised Sound 7(1): 51–6.

Westerkamp, H. 2003. NADA: An experience in sound. InS:ON – Le son dans l’art contemporain canadien/SoundIn Contemporary Canadian Art. Montreal: Editions

Artextes, 114–21.

88 Owen Chapman

Site-Sounds: On strategies of sound art inpublic space

GEORG KLEIN

KlangQuadrat – Office for Sound and Media Art, Manteuffelstr. 77, D–10999 Berlin, GermanyE-mail: mail@georgklein.de

During the mid twentieth century, space was developed as a

composable dimension. Composers used the three spatial

dimensions in their own fashion, but space was understood

primarily as an abstract concept. It was not until the

development of sound installation art that space was discovered

in a concrete manner, explored, performed in and could even

acquire its own specificity, called site-sound (Ortsklang).The article shows consequences and strategies of site-

sound installations in three sections – from spatial sound to

site-sound, public space as performance venue, and public

strategies (acoustic interventions, interactive installations and

participatory projects) – with three examples of site-sound

installations (Site-Sound Marl Mitte, meta.stases andtowersounds.2: watch tower).

Acoustic art in public spaces basically involves installing a

space in another existing space, both physically and sensorially,

and metaphysically and mentally – an interior space in an

exterior space, so to speak. The original quality of sound art

lies in the oscillation of interior and exterior space. Thus publicspaces intensified by sound art cause transitional spaces to

come into being, in a political and a psychoanalytic sense.

1. REVIEW: FROM SPATIAL SOUND TO

SITE-SOUND (RAUMKLANG – ORTSKLANG)

With the rise of serial music during the mid twentiethcentury, space was developed as a composable dimen-sion. Starting from concert situations that eliminatedfrontal orchestral performances, it was above all thedevelopment of multichannel loudspeaker systems –culminating in modern wave-field synthesis – whichmade it possible to exploit space as a parameter forcomposition. Varese and Stockhausen used the threespatial dimensions in their own fashion, as did Boulez,Cage and Schnebel. Space was understood primarily asan abstract concept, however.It was not until the development of sound installation

art that space was discovered in a concretemanner. Thespecificity of a certain space could be brought out:sound artists work with the atmosphere of a particularspace, its acoustic conditions and its visual and archi-tectonic characteristics, to which they carefully give anew timbre or which they present dramatically throughthe medium of sound. The sound of a space is nolonger one of several compositional dimensions, butmoves to the centre of perception as sound space,

as space that is made to resound, which is reflected inthe behaviour of the recipient. If the visual focus ofa performing musician or ensemble is removed andlisteners are no longer compelled to sit in fixed seatsbut can move around freely within the space, a muchstronger spatial perception is possible. ‘Seeing andhearing complement each other to become a holisticspatial experience that is intensified, supplemented andcompleted by the other senses and realised through themovement of the body in the space’ (Ruth 2006: 237).

This specific work with space involves a con-textualisation that is more likely to be found in thevisual arts. The performance or installation site itselfbecomes part of the artistic statement and can evenbecome the point of departure for the artistic con-cept. When the spatial orientation of the music goesbeyond the spatial characteristics in the narrowersense (acoustic, architectonic, sculptural, perspecti-val; so-called Raumklang) and defines the site speci-ficity of the space, I refer to a site-sound, so-calledOrtsklang. I am not concerned with (more or lessfinished) works that are installed at a particular sitebut works that grow out of the site, both conceptuallyand in their execution.

A site-sound develops from an analysis and investi-gation of the situation on site. How does the site pre-sent itself acoustically, visually and architectonically?What materials and objects dominate the site? Whatrole does the site play in social life; how do peoplemove on the site; what meanings are attached to it?What is the perception situation; what encounters takeplace there? What memory does the site have; whatstories are associated with it? What socio-politicalreferences does the site have; what social relationshipto nature defines the site? What conflicts are there inthe site, concealed or conspicuous?

Through this site research – not unlike the psy-chogeography of the situationists in the 1960s – athematic focus, a concept, is developed with whichthe site is altered through sound art – in other words,the situation on the site is influenced and aestheticallyintensified.

My first example (Sound example 1) is the sound/light-installation Site-Sound Marl Midtown. BlueBrat. Much Art. Little Work from 2002 at a little train

Organised Sound 14(1): 101–108 & 2009 Cambridge University Press. Printed in the United Kingdom. doi:10.1017/S1355771809000132

station in Germany’s biggest industrial area, theRuhrgebiet. The train station ‘Marl Centre’ is cov-ered by a concrete hall that has no function: it doesnot serve as a waiting room since the people waitingare all standing on the station platform below. Notrain tickets are sold here and there is no informationservice; the hall opens in a gaping void to the south-west and consequently provides no shelter from rain,sun, wind or snow (figure 1).

The Marl Centre train station and its surroundingsare marked by an urban desolation characteristic ofmodern city suburbs and satellites. The decline is all themore painfully apparent when contrasted with its pre-vious wealth (from mining and chemistry), attested toby the art treasures in the nearby sculpture gardens.

The sound material was gathered entirely from thislocation, the train station itself. Firstly, sound wastaken from the bars in the side walls (of two lengths,hence two pitches), which formed the sound back-ground in the concrete hall by means of four loud-speakers and two subwoofers distributed throughoutthe space. The other sound material consisted of graffitiinscriptions from the waiting room on the train plat-form where the conflicts of the locale are laconicallyand bluntly expressed: conflicts between the right andleft, foreigners and Germans, adults and youth;between declarations of love and of despair, ‘no future’and sunny optimism. ‘Suakraz, you’re the best.’ ‘Sickkids. Live in their own filth. Pigs.’ ‘Dear Geli, dearVanni, I hope you forgive me! I’m really crazy aboutyou!’ ‘Life is hard1unjust.’ ‘Turks! White Power is thebest thing in Marl!’ ‘Love is a name. Sex is a game.Forget the name and play the game.’ ‘Embellish the citygates with Nazi heads.’ ‘I hate you right-wing pigs!!! –and I hate you, you left-wing wimp!’

These sayings were collected and then spoken to tape byyoung people from Marl. The recordings were arrangedinto a voice choir which sounded out of twelve further

loudspeakers, hanging from the ceiling of the hall(figure 2). What previously adorned the walls unnoticednow became an unmediated acoustic presence for the

passers-by. Therewith, by means of three CD playersplaying at different time intervals, a constantly changingvoice-bar arrangement was created. At night, the inner

space of the hall was lit by a utopian blue such that thetransformation of the hall could be recognised from faraway. A billboard on the side of the train station was

rented and, apart from the title, offered a free, whitespace such that for the duration of the installation aprocess of public comment came into being.

The installation provoked strong reactions amongthe public: some speakers were damaged; some teenschoose the hall as a meeting point at night, writingsome comments on the billboard; and a long discus-sion on this kind of ‘sculptural blemish’ and the socialproblems around the city station was going on in thelocal press during the three-month run (see discussionin Ruth 2006: 241).

The German term Ortsklang, used in the title,expresses a stronger concept of site specifity. In termsof its approach, this general development of space toplace is analogous to methods that are more familiarin the visual arts – from objet trouve to opposite polessuch as land art and social sculpture, to current stra-tegies like artistic field research and intervention. It isa material confrontation with reality, which in themusical tradition has thus far only taken place inmusique concrete and with several Fluxus artistsduring the 1960s. The dual material orientation to theworld – through the site as a performance venue andthe aesthetic and thematic conversion of the site –achieves and demands a much deeper penetration andintegration with reality, thus enabling another formof political confrontation.

Figure 1. Site-Sound Marl Midtown. (Ortsklang MarlMitte), sound/light installation in which visual graffiti textsat the railway station in Marl were recited as an acousticspeech choir, in combination with two electronically

modified grid sounds and blue light. Georg Klein, GermanSound Art Award 2002.

Figure 2. Site-Sound Marl Midtown. (Ortsklang MarlMitte), visitor under the twelve horn speakers. The iron

bars can be seen in the background.

102 Georg Klein

2. PUBLIC SPACE AS PERFORMANCE VENUE

Although the development of a site-sound (Ortsk-lang) can be used in concert and gallery spaces, it hasa far broader area of application and greater poten-tial if it is related to public and semi-public spaces,especially so-called transitory spaces as shown in thefirst example. These sites and non-sites – arcades,shopping malls, railway stations, squares, pedestrianunderpasses, urban brown fields, kiosks – are notneutral but are influenced by everyday life, by usesand functions, stories and encounters far removedfrom art.Public space defines itself not simply by its

demarcation from private space but as a politicalspace through its degrees of freedom (explained inmore detail in Klein 2003a), which can be brieflycharacterised as follows:

> Freedom of access: there is no entrance fee, nospecial dress regulation, no special security andpolice personnel, no surveillance.

> Freedom of movement: there are no spatialrestrictions (fixed seating) and no time limits(length of stay).

> Freedom of possession: the public space is notindividual, company or state property in the sensethat institutions are in possession of the space, asin the case of town halls or concert halls.

> Freedom of use: apart from its function as urbanspace, it has no specific purpose, in contrast tostate or institutional spaces and pseudo-publicspaces such as shopping arcades or entire shop-ping centres, which simulate public spaces butserve primarily to stimulate shopping.

These degrees of freedom have not come about bychance but have been gained over centuries. Publicspace is currently losing this freedom, whetherthrough surveillance cameras or huge advertisements,but also due to a loss of importance in view of theincreasingly powerful public media. The politicalimportance of public space becomes especiallyobvious in this context, however. For those who haveno access to state or privately controlled media,there is only the street, public space, which then canin turn become a link in the media public again by theattention of the press or TV broadcasting companies.In particular, appropriation by the capitalist

economy aims at doing away with open, publicspaces, which are transformed into ‘mere passage-ways, mere access to places for consumption andleisure activities’ (Sanio 2006: 9). ‘Art in publicspaces’ has long been part of this appropriation whenit refers to urban sculptural furnishings or acousticornamental art. Emphasising the freedom of thisspace and making people aware that it is decreasingand being violated is the challenge of artistic work,

both in public spaces and semi-public spaces forconsumption and shopping.

Critical works quickly come up against boundaries,as one must observe even in a cosmopolitan, tradi-tionally art-friendly city such as Berlin.1 These bound-aries are not merely restrictions but a source of frictionas well. In contrast to art, theatre and concert spaces –in which virtually everything is allowed but which noone exploits any more, since the artistic environmentguarantees benevolent understanding or art makes noimpression on indifferent tolerance – in public space,including media space, social confrontation is a given.An artist is at the mercy of societal dynamics, betweeneconomic, social and political interests, and soonencounters opposition if his art does not devote itselfto mere urban ornamentation. Whereas only peopleinterested in art go to art spaces, public space hasthe most varied, diverse audience imaginable, fromthe unemployed to stockbrokers. The reactions ofan audience whose everyday routine is confused,disturbed or stimulated are thus equally varied.

Disturbing everyday routine is a main point in mynext example (Sound example 2). In the installationmeta.stases (meta.stasen) an interactive sound instal-lation was built in a tram car that ran on Line 8through Dresden for ten days (figure 3). The tramoperated without a fixed schedule, amongst regulartraffic, and appeared unexpectedly. People goingfrom home to work, from work to shopping, fromshopping to home entered this tram by accident.

Figure 3. meta.stases (meta.stasen): sound/light-installationin a tram car. Vehicle noises are recorded in the engine roomof an old Tatra tram and played back live and transformed

in the passenger compartment along with loudspeakerannouncements. Please imagine intense purple light inside.

European Centre of Arts Hellerau, Dresden, 2007.

1As in, for example, my project ‘too big to fail’, in an architecto-nically very attractive public toilet in front of the headquarters ofthe Landesbank Berlin on Alexanderplatz. It was to examine theBerlin banking scandal, but its execution was prevented. See Klein2005.

Site-Sounds 103

Cables, streets and railways are the arteries of ourcivilisation. Goods, information and people areshuttled from one place to another – uninterruptedly,busily, tirelessly – pushed by the main economic aim:growth. Like a magic word it is supposed to solve allthe social and economic problems of our globalisedsociety. Growth has to be relentlessly stimulated –worldwide, permanently, without limits. The instal-lation confronted listeners, workers and consumers,with the prevailing ideology of growth in all spheresof life – health, business or politics – including allits excrescences and deformities. On their way thepassengers got the latest ‘news’, original quotes onthe topic of growth spoken by well-known newsannouncers from Dresden’s MDR radio station andthe US-American NPR news radio.

These ‘news’ items contrasted natural growth,which – unless pathological – always proceeds gra-dually, with globally propagated economic growth,which should be as unchecked as possible. The lan-guage of business ‘growth makers and pushers’ wasconfronted with the language of cancer researchers,who regard this excessive enlargement as a commu-nication failure between cells which ‘issue orders togrow to themselves’.

These texts were permeated by musical processes: acontrasting medium that sharpens perception. Theyrendered the theme aurally and visually perceptible, inthe form of a spatial–acoustic metastasis with 111 tinyloudspeakers (figure 4). The loudspeakers were stuckto purple-tinted windows in small groups; from eachone a black wire led along the tram’s ceiling to thefront, producing a seemingly floral excrescence. Anacoustic metastasis could suddenly occur, produced byring modulation processes mutating the spoken textsinto a chirping flying quickly through the space of thetram. The sequence of texts was controlled by the tramitself as it appropriated the announcement of stopswith their characteristic ding-dong and used it as achance impulse for playing a certain text. This resultedin a continually changing rendition corresponding tothe 26 tram stops in Dresden.

Two additional floor-level speakers also transmittedthe moving vehicle sounds of the tram, recorded liveand musically transformed by means of resonance fil-ters and delays. The result was the fundamental soundambience for the tram. Together with the purple-tintedwindows the installation transformed the tram car intoan audiovisual space of alteration. The city appearedin a tinted light, while tram noises, signals andannouncements were musically processed live, creatingan acoustic and visual alteration of our accustomedperspective of the world outside. Some people werefascinated, some people were shocked by the ‘sick’atmosphere inside – the light, the sounds, the excres-cence of cables and the permanent reading of news,telling the opposite: ‘This is no disease. This is growth.’

3. PUBLIC STRATEGIES

The performer’s relationship with the audience hadalready been approached and examined radicallyduring the 1960s. Experimental concert forms, thea-trical abuse of audiences and actionist performancesbroke down conventional audience attitudes, buttheir shock effect was also exhausted. Whereas ser-ious music soon returned to its conventional prac-tices, visual art gradually developed new forms ofaudience orientation with interaction, interventionand participation. These forms also occur in soundart, although this is less likely to have a politicaldimension. All three forms – intervention, interactionand participation – are process-based, which is to saythey do not start with a finished work but a situation.

Acoustic interventions in urban space are extremelydependent on the perception situation on site. People’svisual orientation in everyday life and acousticallyeffected stress of traffic noise make sound art inter-ventions considerably more difficult than performativeor visual interventions. Purely acoustic art is rare2, andsound art is generally accompanied by visual elements,be it visible sound objects, light or video. The factor of

Figure 4. Sound/light-installation meta.stases (meta.stasen).Listener with group of loudspeakers. At each of the 13

windows a group of speakers is playing news, sometimesring modulated (all together 111 little speakers, 13channels). All the cables are installed so that they are

visible through the entire tram car.

2For example, the works of Sam Auinger, which are often posi-tioned at acoustic borders in urban spaces.

104 Georg Klein

confusion is the most important element – to interruptthe everyday routine for a moment, to make peoplepause and assume a different perceptual attitude is thebasis of every acoustic intervention.3 Depending onwhere these subtle situational changes are installed –whether in trees in a park or in parking garages, onchurch facades or in the midst of crowds of shoppers –the intervention also acquires a political dimension. Thechoice of site is crucial to the statement.Interactive installations incorporate the physical

movements of the recipient into the sound generationso that the audience orientation is intensified. Usingcomputer-controlled systems, interactive soundevents can be produced which generate musical pro-cesses that are far from simple stimulus–reactionschemata and which bring the body into play again inthe otherwise incorporeal installation world.4 Theyprovide a framework in which the work is not executeduntil the moment the recipient appears, which conse-quently involves a certain incalculability calling forgreat openness on the part of both the producing artistand the receiving listener. The category of chanceintroduced by John Cage is continued here in a per-petual process of musical transformation oriented tothe audience. Although they are not easy to execute inpublic spaces because they represent a substantialinstallation expenditure, interactive installations hold aspecial fascination, since the possibility for discovery –and thus the element of surprise and pleasure in thediscovery – is considerably greater than in art spaces,where the visitor is already pre-attuned, forewarnedand prepared by the artistic setting. Inviting an artpublic to an installation of this kind in a public space isthus almost counterproductive, since the possibility ofhappening upon it by chance no longer exists. Profes-sional art viewers are also compelled to observe notonly the work but the audience’s actions and theirreactions to it as well.Up to now, participatory projects have rarely been

found in sound installation art, but more in Internetmedia space or in other communications media. Withthe network structure of an open broadcast system,anyone can become a potential broadcaster, and sincethe technological basis (computer with sound gen-eration and processing software) became affordablefor the general public in the 1990s, anyone can alsobecome a music and sound producer. Participatorypotentials thus emerge which go beyond a simpleparticipatory phase. Although the available audienceon the Internet is limited, particularly as far as theheterogeneity of the public or the participating actors

is concerned, what initially was still restricted toknowledgeable, technically skilled users will expandin the future (see YouTube). The artistic potential isstill open-ended. This development will also have aretroactive effect on physical public spaces in whichparticipatory installations can be created, as hasalready been established by visual media facades.

The forms of audience orientation presented herecan be combined and are obviously not only encoun-tered in public spaces. But working in public spacesparticularly necessitates thinking about how I reachmy public, attract it to the work, hold it and let it goagain. These are questions that also arise in the concerthall, and within the music are sparked by the conceptof tension, which is oriented to time. With installa-tions, however, I am referring to an area of tensionthat is created by sound art interventions and in whicha concept of time exists that is fundamentally differentfrom that of concert music (see also Klein 2003b).

The audience orientation can also be developed into aregular public relations strategy that makes the externalappearance of the artwork in public (announcements,press releases, website) part of the work. One form ofthis is the fake which, at first glance, pretends not tobe art at all but poses as something else. The elementof confusion can thus be enormously intensified anddeveloped beyond the initial moment. The provoca-tive potential can be very great, as I was able toestablish in my project towersounds.2: Watch Tower(turmlaute.2: Wachturm) (Sound example 3) at theMaerzMusik Festival in 2007, with the appearance inpublic of a newly founded organisation – the EuropeanBorder Watch (EUBW).

EU citizens were invited to monitor the EUexternal borders from their homes as web patrolsagainst illegal immigrants. The audiovisual andinteractive installation in a former GDR borderwatchtower was passed off as the registration centreof the EUBW (figures 5 and 6), which demonstratedthe new surveillance technology modelled on GoogleEarth and at the same time was integrated into thegruesome surveillance history of this site.5

The background was a test run in November 2006in Texas, where, at the instigation of Governor RickPerry, webcams were installed along a short sectionof the fence on the US–Mexican border, the imagesfrom which could be accessed by anyone worldwide.

The European Border Watch Organisation(EUBW) was founded on the basis of the Texanmodel and has established its recruitment centre in theBerlin border watchtower. Registration takes place

3Found in a conceptually pure form in the visually marked listeningpoints of Akio Suzuki, which sharpen hearing in everyday situa-tions.4Interactive musical processes such as interactive variation andacoustical text topography are described in detail in Klein 2006.

5turmlaute.2: Wachturm – Klang | Video | Installation | Organisation |Interaktion (towersounds.2: Watch Tower – Sound | Video | Installation |Organisation | Interaction), MaerzMusik Festival 2007, with the ‘offi-cial’ website www.europeanborderwatch.org, on which there are stillreactions and ‘registrations’. For the full project description, see http://www.georgklein.de

Site-Sounds 105

on the ground floor; blue EU flags at the entrancecreate an ‘official’ atmosphere. The EUBW’s visualshowroom, with a camp bed and an old telephone, issituated on the first floor, and the second floor housesthe acoustic control room, in which the interactivesurveillance equipment is mounted.

The dark visual showroom on the first floor onlyhas narrow embrasures as window openings, six ofwhich are converted to viewing screens for theinstallation (figure 7). Webcam images of ostensibleborder events are seen on them which only showdesert, ocean or forest. Various border images aresimulated in a preliminary trailer: the Bug river onthe border between Poland and Ukraine, a view ofthe Carpathian Mountains, an image on the Molda-vian border at night, an ocean beach between theCanary Islands and northwest Africa, and a webcamimage of the US–Mexican border – the only genuineborder photo – allegedly from the partner organisa-tion, Texas Border Watch. In the same room, behindthe six embrasure covers, small loudspeakers are alsoconcealed under the video screens, from which elec-tronically altered clicking, crackling and rustlingsounds and voices can be heard now and then.

In the acoustic control room on the second floor astanding acoustic field is generated. The basis of thesound is a recording of the natural vibration of theconcrete tower (a low F-sharp, stimulated by slam-ming the heavy embrasure covers). The continuoussound represents the continuousness of the surveil-lance and changes only gradually over the duration ofthe installation in the spirit of an ‘interactive varia-tion’. The field can be modified from the outside bymeans of a laser sensor and a surveillance camerawhich react to ‘incidents’ – movements of uninvolvedpassers-by or traffic in the vicinity of the tower. Thebasic sound is composed of odd-numbered harmonicsof the low F-sharp so that approximately a squarewave is generated, which visually depicts a ‘towerwave’. As a result, the sound resembles an electricgenerator and, because of the low-frequency tonesemitted by a subwoofer, is extremely large at times.

Figure 5. East German watch tower at the Berlin Wall.

Figure 6. Entrance situation with EU flags and EUBWguiding staff.

Figure 7. towersounds.2: Watch Tower (turmlaute.2: Wach-turm), first floor with video screens installed in embrasures

and hidden speakers.

106 Georg Klein

Due to continuous variation in the partials, however,it never remains static, at least until the video cameradetects a passer-by (figures 8–10).If a passer-by crosses the middle surveillance zone,

a voice also emerges from the horn loudspeakerhanging at head level in the centre. The varioussnippets of sentences come from an interview with aborder guard who did his military service in thistower in GDR times and, over 18 years later,recounts how they worked and what unusual eventsoccurred (‘y yes, definitely’, ‘y so what we made,they were such wires, they were self-firing devices, but

they weren’t lethal y’, ‘but somehow the womanprobably – she didn’t make it’.

The second floor has continuous windows that arecovered with green transparent sheeting. As a result,on the inside all colours are altered: the viewer’s ownface is pale green and all contrasts are strangelyweakened. At the same time, the view towards theoutside is coloured green, as with military nightvision equipment.

The publicity for the installation became part ofthe artistic work and was fully integrated into theproject. Through a website created for the installa-tion, which appeared to be very serious, as well aselectronic and written invitations, EU citizens wereinvited to actively monitor the European externalborders. In addition, an invitation to the opening ofthe Berlin registration centre of the EUBW was sentto the press and everyone accessible to us via theInternet. Responses were collected by reply mail andthe feedback form on the website, and were pastedinto the comment book that was made available inthe tower. For on-site visitors there was a specialguided tour, with a welcome at the entrance on behalfof the European Border Watch (figure 11) and agreen informational handout with a web patrolregistration form on the back. In the video showroom‘George Klein’ appeared as a guide to the EUBW andexplained the satellite webcam system and the goalsof the organisation to the visitors, inviting them to liedown on the camp bed and, with this overview of allEU external borders, to choose a surveillance area. Afew people were taken with the idea, however, andwere in favour of more restrictive measures at theborder. But most of the visitors got upset, which ledto many in-depth discussions about the background,the subject matter and the objectives of the installa-tion during its four-week run.

Figure 8. towersounds.2: Watch Tower (turmlaute.2: Wach-

turm), second floor with horn loudspeaker, green shininglamps and windows, subwoofer at the back.

Figure 9. Laser sensor for traffic control used for soundtransformations.

Figure 10. Video camera for observing the park paths andinteractive play of the surveillant voice. Please imagine

intense green light.

Site-Sounds 107

4. CONCLUSION: TRANSITIONAL SPACES

The European Border Watch project dealt with theoverlapping of media space and physical space, eventhough it concerned a fake. Acoustic art in publicspaces basically involves installing a space in anotherexisting space, both physically and sensorially, andmetaphysically and mentally (as a space for reflectionand emotion) – an interior space in an exterior space,so to speak. The original quality of sound art, whichcannot be achieved by either music or the visual arts,lies in the oscillation of interior and exterior space.

Thus, public spaces intensified by sound art are notonly accommodated in so-called transitional spaces(arcades, underpasses, and so on), they cause transi-tional spaces to come into being, in a political and apsychoanalytic sense.6 They intervene between inter-ior and exterior as well as between the public and theprivate. ‘This transition represents one of the greatproblems of the continuation of the EuropeanEnlightenment’ (Neubar 2002: 29) and has a socialdimension that becomes apparent in sound art works

in public space. The previously mentioned dual mate-rial orientation to the world beyond the site and theopen form as a situational process (in the threedimensions of intervention, interaction and participa-tion) defines sound art (or audiovisual art) in publicspace. Its transformational potentiality in a mediumthat is as space-filling as it is transitory qualifies thiskind of art. To be in transition signifies life as a tran-sitional space in which one can continually get lost –and at the same time find oneself again.7

REFERENCES

Klein, G. 2003a. Unter freiem Himmel. In C. Brustle, M.Rebstock, H. Schulze (eds.) Berlin Society of New Music

Yearbook: Music | Politics. Saarbrucken: Pfau.Klein, G. 2003b. Spannungsraume. Einige Uberlegungen

zum Raumbegriff in der Klangkunst (Areas of Tension.

Several Thoughts on the Concept of Space in SoundArt). In G. Nauck (ed.) Positionen No. 54. Muhlenbeck:Positionen.

Klein, G. 2003c. From the Sound Installation to the SoundSituation. On my work transition – Berlin junction. EineKlangsituation. Organised Sound 8(2).

Klein, G. 2005. Dazwischenkommen – Klangkunstlerische

Interventionen im offentlichen Raum. 19. Dresdner Tagefur zeitgenossische Musik (Dresden ContemporaryMusic Days). http://www.georgklein.de/coma-deutsch/

PresseTexte/EinzelTexte/GK-dazwischenkommen/GK-dazwischenkom-Frameset.html.

Klein, G. 2006. Interactive Variation: On the relativity of

sound and movement in ‘transition’ and ‘TRASA’. InC. Mahnkopf (ed.) Electronics in New Music. Heidelberg:Wolke.

Neubaur, C. 2002. Winnicott – Das Leben, ein Uber-gangsraum (Winnicott – Life, a Transitional Space). InG. Klein (ed.) Transition – Berlin Junction. Eine Klang-situation (Transition – Berlin Junction. A sound situa-

tion). Saarbrucken: Pfau.Ruth, U. 2006. Die Vermittlung von Klangkunst. Pra-

sentation als Raumerfahrung (The Communication of

Sound Art. Presentation as Spatial Experience). In G.Weckwerth, M. Osterwold (eds.) Catalogue sonambiente.Heidelberg: Kehrer.

Sanio, S. 2006. Stadt Raum Kontroll Verlust AneignungInteraktion (City Space Control Loss AppropriationInteraction). Berlin: Kunsthochschule Weißensee.

Figure 11. Logo of the fictitious European Border WatchOrganisation, based on the actual Texas Border Watch

Organization, which served as the model for the projecttowersounds.2: Watch Tower (turmlaute.2: Wachturm) in

the border watchtower.

6From the psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott comes the term ‘transi-tional object’, which enables the baby to make the initial transitionfrom its mother to the world, in which the ‘real achievement ofsublimation lies in the creation of transitional space, an ‘‘inter-mediate area’’, a ‘‘potential space’’ ’ (Neubaur 2002).

7Further details on my basic concept of transitions can be found inKlein 2003c.

108 Georg Klein

amplifies the dripping of water in an undergroundchamber – and Christina Kubisch is interviewedabout the technical and aesthetic issues surroundingher Electrical Walks (in which the magnetic fieldsgenerated by electrical equipment in urban environ-ments are amplified). Kubisch goes on to talk aboutacoustic cartography and the identification of elec-tromagnetic ‘regional accents’. Finally, Alvin Luciertalks about his own work and approach to sound art.Thoughts and techniques surrounding sound

recording practice are covered through interviewswith several respected practitioners. Chris Watson dis-cusses his work, and in particular issues of extraneous orunwanted noise from the point of view of the naturerecordist, while Peter Cusack describes a specific work –Sound From Dangerous Places – which addresses thedisconnection between what is perceived as being adangerous landscape and the often entirely innocuoussoundworld that occupies it: the diversity and richnessof soundscapes in these areas can be aesthetically richand engaging, and quite at odds with the other impli-cations of that context. The craft of the nature recordistis explored through contributions (such as CharlesFox’s) that include descriptions or photographs ofrecording setups, and Bill Davies offers a brief outline ofacoustics issues that present themselves to the individualinterested in capturing sound in the environment.All of the above offer excellent perspectives and

case studies on introductory issues surrounding thesubject area; meanwhile, meatier philosophical andontological discussions will satisfy more specialistreaders of the book, tackling (and challenging) someentrenched ideas surrounding sonic environmentstudy. Tim Ingold raises objections to the very term‘soundscape’ sufficiently convincingly to make meslightly self-conscious about using the term at all inthe present text. Salome Voegelin (‘Vollig Losgelost’)discusses how the disjunction between familiar visualand unfamiliar aural that occurs in early science fic-tion prompts an investigative listening mode, andobserves how such a listening mode can be invoked toencourage a revised aural appreciation of a familiarspace. Rhama Khazam investigates the relationshipof sound to sculpture and architecture, discussing thenature of time and evolving relationships betweenthe observer and work in much contemporary artwhile proposing the re-evaluation of the relativeimportance of the visual and the aural, advocatingintroducing aural strategies in the development ofarchitecture – not only architecture considering thelandscape but that being informed by soundscape andmusical models, the evolution of organic shapes takinginspiration from quasi-organic virtual soundscapes ascreated by electroacoustic musicians (thus a revisitingof the notion of a ‘tuning of the world’). Steve Good-man celebrates the ‘bass materialism’ of sound – theubiquity and potency of low frequency and infrasound

(‘a contagious swamp of rumblings, gurglings andmurmurs’) and its relationship to architectural form.Finally, Max Dixon contextualises much of the contentof the other articles in terms of policy development inLondon relating to the sound environment. He advo-cates a more subjective interpretation of noise issuesbeyond ‘simple noise indicators’ and echoes the com-mon consensus that emerges throughout the bookregarding acoustic ecological concerns: that the issue isnot about cancellation of noise, but about enhance-ment of the quality of the sonic environment, whichmany of the referenced projects and studies aredesigned to address.

Overall, then, Autumn Leaves is a book that canfunction as a solid introductory text, as a survey ofindividual case studies relevant to the field, as achallenge to existing understanding of the subject(offering, as it does, additional and more unusualperspectives on a variety of relevant issues), or simplyas pleasurable ‘dipping’ material (which is perhapsthe reason I enjoyed it most): all of this along withsome intriguing photographic documentation and anextensive (and equally intriguing and diverse) set ofrecordings on the web resources site.

Peter Batchelorpbatchelor@dmu.ac.uk

Jamie Sexton (ed.), Music, Sound and Multimedia:From the live to the virtual. Edinburgh. Edinburgh

University Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0-748-62534-5

doi:10.1017/S135577180900017X

This edited volume of ten chapters is just one part ofa new series on ‘Music and the Moving Image’ (serieseditor Kevin Donnelly), whose main focus is ‘screenmusic’ and intended primary audience (according tothe back cover) most naturally that of media studies.The text reviewed here is divided into four sections,covering Fandom and Music Videos, Video-GameMusic, Performance and Presentation, and Productionand Consumption, and contains a good proportionof work that may be of interest to readers of thisjournal. For instance, there are chapters on sound artand electroacoustic music, the former justified asbeing most often a multimedia practice, and the latterthe limiting case of the audio modality (via theacousmatic mode), and thus a useful asymptote foranalysis.

(By the way, this review does not presume thatreaders have no interest in film music – in NicholasCook’s sense of audio subservient to visuals – thoughperhaps many here might care a little more about theattention given to the audio modality than the filmmusic cliche of music and sounds acting as non-diegetic emotional prop and synchretic foley art

Book reviews 111

respectively. Besides, the book often pays homage tothe usual references, such as Michel Chion.)

Much of the contents of the volume is intriguing,from Dana Milstein’s case study of anime fan videos,which will have you checking animemusicvideos.org,through Jem Kelly’s dissection of the modern multi-media pop concert and the Gorillaz in particular, to thefinal section encompassing website sound, young peo-ple’s attitudes to music, and the ubiquitous iPod study.Scholarship on video game music, as provided in sec-tion two by Rob Munday’s survey and Zach Whalen’ssemi-semiotic case study of Silent Hill, is a welcometerritory, and most definitely an important growtharea of academic engagement (nay-sayers here shouldlook up recent statistics on games sales versus thefilm industry, for example http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/apr/28/games.filmnews).

As it stands, Section Three’s dissection of Perfor-mance and Presentation is perhaps of most generalrelevance to this journal. Some interesting coverage ofsound art is provided by Jamie Sexton himself, witha certain bias to the Sonic Boom catalogue curatedby David Toop. Randolph Jordan’s ‘Case Study: FilmSound, Acoustic Ecology and Performance in Elec-troacoustic Music’ is as much as anything a selection ofattitudes to acousmatic music and diffusion, one hopesto the benefit of many media theorists!

The main omission in this book is a lack of coverageof live audiovisual practice in VJing or live cinema.The title might lead the reader to expect some, but theindex will disappoint, and a close reading will provethe absence, despite almost getting there on pages107–8 in a couple of oblique references to ‘audiovisualtechnologies’ and ‘contemporary technologies’. It maybe that a commissioned chapter was lost in the editingprocess; it happens. There are other sources for thisinformation, but the breadth of the book (whichis admittedly wide to begin with) would have beenfurther aided by this topic. It would also have beeninteresting to have seen the opposite asymptote to theacousmatic, visuals alone, covering for instance silentvisual music such as Fischinger’s Radio Dynamics.

A further list of quibbles could be presented, but,as per any edited volume, there is a natural variationin writing style and the odd infelicity must creep in toprovide character! Barthes, Baudrillard, Deleuze andGuattari are not to everyone’s taste, but fortunatelydo not appear in every chapter; Rob Munday makesmost use of them, also mixing in a little (inadequatelyreferenced) neuroscience too, in his personal theore-tical analysis of video game music. The ‘postmodernfield’ is still trod upon on p. 114 by Jem Kelly; it’sprobably quite a difficult field to ever escape usingthe meta-stile. At various locations throughout thebook, there is a tendency towards armchair philosophyand uncorroborated claims without further data orcitation as evidence. Whilst the theoretical contribution

of work throughout the volume is not particularlyground-breaking, and often just has the status ofreview, nevertheless some interesting points are pre-sented, including a salient discussion of NicholasCook’s theory of multimedia in Jamie Sexton’s intro-duction. In case it wasn’t already apparent, practicalinformation for artists is not really part of the book’smandate.

Best to review a copy yourself in a library orbookshop, or via Amazon’s Look Inside featurebefore purchase. There is something (happily?) quirkyabout this volume that makes it hard to review ina uniform sense, though I hesitate to use the word‘gallimaufry’ as per page 114. Depending on yourneeds, this book may provide some useful inputto projects concerning multimedia. Yet whilst TheResidents adorn the cover, you won’t find them inside;Resident Evil lurks there instead, and a host of otherunexpected, sometimes awkward and sometimesnourishing information.

Nick CollinsN.Collins@sussex.ac.uk

Nick Collins and Julio d’Escrivan (eds.), The CambridgeCompanion to Electronic Music. Cambridge University

Press, Cambridge, 2007. ISBN 978-0-521-68865-9

doi:10.1017/S1355771809000193

Part of the Cambridge Companion to Music bookseries, this recent offering attempts to provide aroadmap of the history, practice and current state ofelectronic music for the intelligent lay-person andstudents. By way of introduction, the promotionalblurb for the book notes:

Musicians are always quick to adopt and explore newtechnologies. The fast-paced changes wrought by elec-trification, from the microphone via the analogue syn-thesiser to the laptop computer, have led to a wide

diversity of new musical styles and techniques. Electronicmusic has grown to a broad field of investigation, takingin historical movements such as musique concrete and

elektronische Musik, and contemporary trends such aselectronic dance music and electronica. A fascinatingarray of composers and inventors have contributed to a

diverse set of technologies, practices and music. This bookbrings together some novel threads through this scene,from the viewpoint of researchers at the forefront of thesonic explorations empowered by electronic technology.

The chapters provide accessible and insightful overviewsof core topic areas and uncover some hitherto less pub-licised corners of worldwide movements. Recent areas of

intense activity such as audiovisuals, live electronic music,interactivity and network music are actively promoted.

The text provided a wonderful opportunity forpractitioners or theorists in the field to then engage

112 Book reviews

Book reviews

Andrew Hugill, The Digital Musician. Routledge, New

York, 2008. ISBN 0-415-96216-1

doi:10.1017/S1355771809000144

When is a book not just a book? When the book inquestion is The Digital Musician by Professor AndrewHugill. As a standalone text it is as fine an example ofan approachable academic book aimed at technologi-cally literate students as one could want. However,Hugill’s text, in keeping with his subject – the digitallynetworked, culturally savvy musician – reaches beyondthe mere printed page through the inclusion of copiousand wide-ranging listening examples, recommendedfurther reading and creative projects. As many of theseare embedded at key points in the text, rather than atthe end of each chapter in a bibliography, the bookreads more like an extended website with a multitude ofhyperlinks extending in a number of cultural, techno-logical and historical directions. In addition, there isalso a digital resource located at http://www.digitalmusician.org that allows the reader to follow up indetail references mentioned in the book itself, as well aslinking to Hugill’s MusiMoo – an online interactiveeducational environment. So this book ticks all of theeducational boxes replete with a wealth of resources tosatisfy both the student and educator alike. But is it anygood beyond this novel organisation and hyperlink-heavy online site? Well, the answer is a resounding yes.It is the author’s fascination with music in the digital

(or post-digital) age rather than the micro-genres ofdigital music per se that makes this book so interesting.The Digital Musician is by no means a ‘how to’ book.The author himself clearly states that this was never hisintention. Rather the book tackles the often ignoredquestions of ‘why?’ and ‘what?’ These questions are notonly applicable to students of technology and compo-sition, but are those that any sound artist or musicianwho creates anything worthwhile is continually askinghimself or herself. As such, Hugill’s book is a manifestoagainst myopic musicians. It is a call for its readers towake up and to interact with culture in a creative andmeaningful way. This credo is evident in many of theauthor’s examples that come from literature, art, andmusic of many diverse cultures, as well as in theplethora of excellent projects included at the end ofthe book. Hugill’s approach is exemplified in the

very opening of the book, which comprises a briefdiscussion of the cover – Paul Gauguin’s masterpieceWhere Do We Come From? What Are We? Where AreWe Going? of 1897. Hugill extrapolates from this thecore themes of his book – the assimilation of diversecultural influences, what it means to be a musician inthe digital age, and how these technologies havechanged how we create, distribute and indeed listento the music we now make. Such analogies andreferences illustrate how the author’s own ideas areinformed and embedded within these rhizomaticcultural associations.

The book is essentially in three parts. The firstprovides a technical overview of the properties ofsound, methods of sound synthesis, sound proces-sing, recording and how we actually listen to sound.All of these subjects are illustrated with well-chosenmusical examples, making what otherwise could havebeen another dry technical account more relevant andimmediate to the reader. Perhaps the best example ofthis is Chapter 4, which is concerned with the orga-nisation of sound. Here, Hugill not only discussesacoustics and the behaviour of sound in spacethrough filters and FFTs, but also sound diffusion,surround sound, time and duration in composition,sound transformations through time, spectro-morpology, Xenakis’ UPIC system and glitch music.Each of these elements could be a chapter in itsown right. However, one of the major strengths ofthis book is the author’s lateral thinking and hisalmost virtuosic ability to draw together a wealth oftechnical and aesthetic ideas in order to illustrate hispoints.

The second section, and perhaps the most inter-esting, is an extended discussion of what it actuallymeans to be a digital musician. This section includesnot only a critique of the ‘performer’ and notions of‘musicianship’ through such concepts as networkedperformance, what it means to be ‘live’ and inter-activity, but also a discussion of how the digitalmusician is situated culturally. This last section couldpotentially be a theoretical quagmire. However,Hugill deftly manages to distil the essential argu-ments behind modernism, postmodernism, structur-alism and deconstruction as well as semiotics into amere twenty-four pages. Forget your ‘Idiots Guide

Organised Sound 14(1): 109–117 & 2009 Cambridge University Press. Printed in the United Kingdom.

toy’ and other such texts – read this chapter andthen follow the recommended reading.

The final part of the book presents a series ofextended interviews and performance projects sui-table for individual classes and extended workshops.The list of those interviewed is impressive andincludes such figures as Martyn Ware, Atau Tanaka,Sophy Smith and Kaffe Matthews. The intervieweeshave, for the most part, been generous with theiranswers, and as such they represent an interestingcross-section of views and techniques of con-temporary ‘experimental electronic music’ practi-tioners. Although the author briefly discusses thedifferences between such terminologies as sound-art,sonic art and sound design in Chapter 4, in theinterview in the final part he poses the intriguingquestion ‘is any of your sound-based work not‘‘music’’ as such?’ Perhaps I am being too greedygiven the breadth that the book already covers, butI would have welcomed an extended discussion ofwhether the author himself considers the digitalmusician to be making something other than musicand, if they are doing so, what this is. This is, how-ever, only a minor quibble. The Digital Musician is ahighly stimulating book that asks of its readers asmany questions as it attempts to answer. As such it isstrongly recommended.

Mathew Adkinsm.adkins@hud.ac.uk

Angus Carlyle (ed.) Autumn Leaves: Sound and theenvironment in artistic practice. Paris Double Entendre,

2007. ISBN 09548074-3-X

doi:10.1017/S1355771809000156

Autumn Leaves brings together a collection of 37essays by a number of authors whose connection istheir interest in various aspects of environmentalsound art theory and practice. The book is a cele-bration of the richness of sound in space – ‘of thecomplexity of sound’s movements to and fro and ofthe wonders of our ears and minds’ (p. 5). It is highlyeclectic in scope, the articles of varying intensity butconsistently concise, making quite easy but intriguingand often provocative reading, and encapsulating theprincipal issues concerning proponents of soundscapestudies and acoustic ecology today. Several of thearticles invite further exploration of their subjectmatter elsewhere, thus the book operates in large partas a springboard from which to investigate eachviewpoint more extensively. The book includes sev-eral pointers to a variety of online resources: relatedor supplementary material is presented on the pub-lisher’s own site (untranslated interviews and furtherarticles by the featured authors), and a collaborative

project, also entitled Autumn Leaves, can be foundat http://www.gruenrekorder.de, which offers threecomplementary (and complimentary) downloadableCDs by artists variously connected with the book andsound practice generally.

The sheer diversity of subject matter exploredmust have represented something of a challenge instructuring the book, which is decidedly non-linearin its organisation. Picking out particular themes andemphases that run throughout, as I have attemptedto do in the following, should give the flavour of itscontents, though it seems rather to belie their richness.

Documentation of the sonic environment and lis-tening practice provides content for several of thechapters and ranges from the detailing of particularplaces/situations – for example, hospital wards (TimWainwright and John Wynne) and New York in awinter cold spell (Aki Onda) – to the collection andarchiving of sound recordings representing largerenvironments: John Levack Drever discusses thesoundscape of Dartmoor in Devon and the culturalresponses to sounds (and changing soundscapes) inrural communities, while Cathy Lane offers a Hebri-dean sound map that lists the sounds and, in particular,lost sounds of that environment. Chapters dealing with50 Finnish soundscapes and 50 Japanese soundscapesdemonstrate the extension of this archival practice tothe national scale. More unusual listening contextsare covered by Dan Holdsworth, who constructs anexperiential image of the anechoic chamber throughthe quotes of others, and Tom Rice, who discusses eartraining peculiar to doctors involving stethoscopes andalternative routes into understanding the workings ofthe body through sound. And Angus Carlyle presentsan intense description of a soundworld experienced atthe point of waking – ambiguous and with heightenedsensation which is allied strongly with triggered andspontaneous thought.

Discussions of listening practice extend, inevitably,to acoustic ecology concerns and the importance ofincreasing public awareness of the sonic environment.This is addressed through descriptions of soundwalkdevelopment (Hildegard Westerkamp), sound categor-isation exercises, and investigations of listeners’ recep-tion of or response to sonic spaces. Tashi Petter andRachael White present an assortment of individuals’‘favourite sounds’ in the environment (presumablygleaned from impromptu interviews with members ofthe public), while Mira Choi proposes the developmentof a kind of graphic gauge representing the subjectivequality or value (that is, nice or nasty) of sound irre-spective of its inherent loudness or ‘noisiness’.

Acoustic awareness-raising is related in turn to theexploration of the soundscape through sound art/sculpture and environmental intervention – soundart as ear cleaning. Jem Finer describes his Scorefor a Hole in the Ground – a horn in a forest which

110 Book reviews

toy’ and other such texts – read this chapter andthen follow the recommended reading.

The final part of the book presents a series ofextended interviews and performance projects sui-table for individual classes and extended workshops.The list of those interviewed is impressive andincludes such figures as Martyn Ware, Atau Tanaka,Sophy Smith and Kaffe Matthews. The intervieweeshave, for the most part, been generous with theiranswers, and as such they represent an interestingcross-section of views and techniques of con-temporary ‘experimental electronic music’ practi-tioners. Although the author briefly discusses thedifferences between such terminologies as sound-art,sonic art and sound design in Chapter 4, in theinterview in the final part he poses the intriguingquestion ‘is any of your sound-based work not‘‘music’’ as such?’ Perhaps I am being too greedygiven the breadth that the book already covers, butI would have welcomed an extended discussion ofwhether the author himself considers the digitalmusician to be making something other than musicand, if they are doing so, what this is. This is, how-ever, only a minor quibble. The Digital Musician is ahighly stimulating book that asks of its readers asmany questions as it attempts to answer. As such it isstrongly recommended.

Mathew Adkinsm.adkins@hud.ac.uk

Angus Carlyle (ed.) Autumn Leaves: Sound and theenvironment in artistic practice. Paris Double Entendre,

2007. ISBN 09548074-3-X

doi:10.1017/S1355771809000156

Autumn Leaves brings together a collection of 37essays by a number of authors whose connection istheir interest in various aspects of environmentalsound art theory and practice. The book is a cele-bration of the richness of sound in space – ‘of thecomplexity of sound’s movements to and fro and ofthe wonders of our ears and minds’ (p. 5). It is highlyeclectic in scope, the articles of varying intensity butconsistently concise, making quite easy but intriguingand often provocative reading, and encapsulating theprincipal issues concerning proponents of soundscapestudies and acoustic ecology today. Several of thearticles invite further exploration of their subjectmatter elsewhere, thus the book operates in large partas a springboard from which to investigate eachviewpoint more extensively. The book includes sev-eral pointers to a variety of online resources: relatedor supplementary material is presented on the pub-lisher’s own site (untranslated interviews and furtherarticles by the featured authors), and a collaborative

project, also entitled Autumn Leaves, can be foundat http://www.gruenrekorder.de, which offers threecomplementary (and complimentary) downloadableCDs by artists variously connected with the book andsound practice generally.

The sheer diversity of subject matter exploredmust have represented something of a challenge instructuring the book, which is decidedly non-linearin its organisation. Picking out particular themes andemphases that run throughout, as I have attemptedto do in the following, should give the flavour of itscontents, though it seems rather to belie their richness.

Documentation of the sonic environment and lis-tening practice provides content for several of thechapters and ranges from the detailing of particularplaces/situations – for example, hospital wards (TimWainwright and John Wynne) and New York in awinter cold spell (Aki Onda) – to the collection andarchiving of sound recordings representing largerenvironments: John Levack Drever discusses thesoundscape of Dartmoor in Devon and the culturalresponses to sounds (and changing soundscapes) inrural communities, while Cathy Lane offers a Hebri-dean sound map that lists the sounds and, in particular,lost sounds of that environment. Chapters dealing with50 Finnish soundscapes and 50 Japanese soundscapesdemonstrate the extension of this archival practice tothe national scale. More unusual listening contextsare covered by Dan Holdsworth, who constructs anexperiential image of the anechoic chamber throughthe quotes of others, and Tom Rice, who discusses eartraining peculiar to doctors involving stethoscopes andalternative routes into understanding the workings ofthe body through sound. And Angus Carlyle presentsan intense description of a soundworld experienced atthe point of waking – ambiguous and with heightenedsensation which is allied strongly with triggered andspontaneous thought.

Discussions of listening practice extend, inevitably,to acoustic ecology concerns and the importance ofincreasing public awareness of the sonic environment.This is addressed through descriptions of soundwalkdevelopment (Hildegard Westerkamp), sound categor-isation exercises, and investigations of listeners’ recep-tion of or response to sonic spaces. Tashi Petter andRachael White present an assortment of individuals’‘favourite sounds’ in the environment (presumablygleaned from impromptu interviews with members ofthe public), while Mira Choi proposes the developmentof a kind of graphic gauge representing the subjectivequality or value (that is, nice or nasty) of sound irre-spective of its inherent loudness or ‘noisiness’.

Acoustic awareness-raising is related in turn to theexploration of the soundscape through sound art/sculpture and environmental intervention – soundart as ear cleaning. Jem Finer describes his Scorefor a Hole in the Ground – a horn in a forest which

110 Book reviews

amplifies the dripping of water in an undergroundchamber – and Christina Kubisch is interviewedabout the technical and aesthetic issues surroundingher Electrical Walks (in which the magnetic fieldsgenerated by electrical equipment in urban environ-ments are amplified). Kubisch goes on to talk aboutacoustic cartography and the identification of elec-tromagnetic ‘regional accents’. Finally, Alvin Luciertalks about his own work and approach to sound art.Thoughts and techniques surrounding sound

recording practice are covered through interviewswith several respected practitioners. Chris Watson dis-cusses his work, and in particular issues of extraneous orunwanted noise from the point of view of the naturerecordist, while Peter Cusack describes a specific work –Sound From Dangerous Places – which addresses thedisconnection between what is perceived as being adangerous landscape and the often entirely innocuoussoundworld that occupies it: the diversity and richnessof soundscapes in these areas can be aesthetically richand engaging, and quite at odds with the other impli-cations of that context. The craft of the nature recordistis explored through contributions (such as CharlesFox’s) that include descriptions or photographs ofrecording setups, and Bill Davies offers a brief outline ofacoustics issues that present themselves to the individualinterested in capturing sound in the environment.All of the above offer excellent perspectives and

case studies on introductory issues surrounding thesubject area; meanwhile, meatier philosophical andontological discussions will satisfy more specialistreaders of the book, tackling (and challenging) someentrenched ideas surrounding sonic environmentstudy. Tim Ingold raises objections to the very term‘soundscape’ sufficiently convincingly to make meslightly self-conscious about using the term at all inthe present text. Salome Voegelin (‘Vollig Losgelost’)discusses how the disjunction between familiar visualand unfamiliar aural that occurs in early science fic-tion prompts an investigative listening mode, andobserves how such a listening mode can be invoked toencourage a revised aural appreciation of a familiarspace. Rhama Khazam investigates the relationshipof sound to sculpture and architecture, discussing thenature of time and evolving relationships betweenthe observer and work in much contemporary artwhile proposing the re-evaluation of the relativeimportance of the visual and the aural, advocatingintroducing aural strategies in the development ofarchitecture – not only architecture considering thelandscape but that being informed by soundscape andmusical models, the evolution of organic shapes takinginspiration from quasi-organic virtual soundscapes ascreated by electroacoustic musicians (thus a revisitingof the notion of a ‘tuning of the world’). Steve Good-man celebrates the ‘bass materialism’ of sound – theubiquity and potency of low frequency and infrasound

(‘a contagious swamp of rumblings, gurglings andmurmurs’) and its relationship to architectural form.Finally, Max Dixon contextualises much of the contentof the other articles in terms of policy development inLondon relating to the sound environment. He advo-cates a more subjective interpretation of noise issuesbeyond ‘simple noise indicators’ and echoes the com-mon consensus that emerges throughout the bookregarding acoustic ecological concerns: that the issue isnot about cancellation of noise, but about enhance-ment of the quality of the sonic environment, whichmany of the referenced projects and studies aredesigned to address.

Overall, then, Autumn Leaves is a book that canfunction as a solid introductory text, as a survey ofindividual case studies relevant to the field, as achallenge to existing understanding of the subject(offering, as it does, additional and more unusualperspectives on a variety of relevant issues), or simplyas pleasurable ‘dipping’ material (which is perhapsthe reason I enjoyed it most): all of this along withsome intriguing photographic documentation and anextensive (and equally intriguing and diverse) set ofrecordings on the web resources site.

Peter Batchelorpbatchelor@dmu.ac.uk

Jamie Sexton (ed.), Music, Sound and Multimedia:From the live to the virtual. Edinburgh. Edinburgh

University Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0-748-62534-5

doi:10.1017/S135577180900017X

This edited volume of ten chapters is just one part ofa new series on ‘Music and the Moving Image’ (serieseditor Kevin Donnelly), whose main focus is ‘screenmusic’ and intended primary audience (according tothe back cover) most naturally that of media studies.The text reviewed here is divided into four sections,covering Fandom and Music Videos, Video-GameMusic, Performance and Presentation, and Productionand Consumption, and contains a good proportionof work that may be of interest to readers of thisjournal. For instance, there are chapters on sound artand electroacoustic music, the former justified asbeing most often a multimedia practice, and the latterthe limiting case of the audio modality (via theacousmatic mode), and thus a useful asymptote foranalysis.

(By the way, this review does not presume thatreaders have no interest in film music – in NicholasCook’s sense of audio subservient to visuals – thoughperhaps many here might care a little more about theattention given to the audio modality than the filmmusic cliche of music and sounds acting as non-diegetic emotional prop and synchretic foley art

Book reviews 111

I approached this review with some apprehension.It is a fine balancing act between being supportive ofone’s colleagues and their genuine efforts to promotethe field, and also acting as a critical arbitrator ofwhether an opportunity to explain our field to othershad been fully grasped. Overall, there is a substantialcollection of material here to engage the reader.Structurally, however, it is difficult to see why someof the essays fell into the three divisions given thematerial that is presented in each section. Further,there are some potential sectional topics that seem tobe neglected. Both of the artists’ statement sectionsseemed to be problematic. It may have been betterhere to put forward a few focused interviews with abalanced selection of major practitioners across theart music and popular music fields.Of passing concern was that some of the major

academics and practitioners who could have writtenwell on topics that are covered in the book are absent.Further, given the extensive material accumulated injournals such as CUP’s own Organised Sound andPopular Music, MIT’s The Computer Music Journaland Leonard Music Journal, and conference pro-ceeding such as NIME and ICMC that could bedrawn on, there are some surprising omissions in thebibliography provided.To my mind, in the history of technology and music,

pivotal points rely on the coming together of uniquepractitioners as storytellers, the use of simple and robustalgorithms to generate material implemented through anew technology that can be commonly shared, towardsreflecting a current or changing social situation. Thereare moments in electronic music, both art music andpopular, where these factors have coincided, and theidiom has been integrated with the narrative traditionsmany share. Some of these points of integration arecovered well in the book, and a wider consideration ofpopular music would have covered others.At the same time, constant experimentation is a

healthy and necessary part of any ongoing process,and the book reflects something of the fractionatednature of the later digital music discovery process.For example, we have many standardised tools, butan emerging sonic language that is not widely shared;some clear intellectual understandings of the processof making sounds, but a less clear understanding ofhow our narrative bodies try and make sense of thenew sonic offering in the idiom.A main concern, however, is that the book as a

whole partly pulls its punches, missing something ofthe opportunity to take a balanced overall view anddeal directly with some of the larger current issuesthat are integral to the idiom: something an intelligentlay-person or conventional musician may still beg for.

Ian Whalleymusik@waikato.ac.nz

Marc Leman, Embodied Music Cognition and Media-tion Technology. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA,

and London, 2008. ISBN 978-0-262-12293-1

doi:10.1017/S1355771809000168

The human science of music certainly seems to bea hot topic right now. The publication in quicksuccession of Daniel Levitin’s This is Your Brain onMusic and Oliver Sacks’ Musicophilia: Tales of Musicand the Brain, has brought discussions of the natureof music cognition and its medical and neuro-physical manifestations to a wide audience, and hasreminded us, if we needed reminding, that music in allits forms and consequences is one of the central issuesin human life. Both these books, together withLevitin’s more recent The World in Six Songs, takethe embodied nature of musical activity for granted,at least in their parallel fascination with the workingsof the human brain, in sickness or in health. How-ever, most of the more specialist investigations intomusic cognition to date have come from anotherethos, where cognition is viewed as a more abstractedattempt to get at the logical systems ‘behind’ thehuman involvement with music, and frequently totest them through implementations in computersoftware. In his important and comprehensive bookThe Musical Mind: The cognitive psychology of music,John Sloboda puts it like this,

Cognitive psychology occupies a vital pivotal positionbetween the extremes because both ‘biologists’ and

‘sociologists’ identify individual human thought andaction as the ‘given’ which requires explanation. The‘neutral’ cognitive psychologist attempts to articulate

the structure of human thought and action in a way thatleaves aside the question of cause – biological or social.

Sloboda 1985: 240

For some time now, both cognitive science per seand its philosophical underpinnings have beenundergoing a big change, with a number of challengesto this viewpoint taking a more physicalist, embodiedapproach. Thus it is good to see Marc Leman in hismost recent book, Embodied Music Cognition andMediation Technology, taking on these developmentsand applying their insights to issues of music cogni-tion. The main focus of the book is one highlypractical issue: how can we deal with the wealth ofdigitally encoded music now available to us in effi-cient and intuitive ways? This is clearly a matter ofimport to the iPod and mobile phone generation, andto the growing industrial base intent on deliveringmusic to us in a manner engaging enough to thwartillegal downloading. In order to deal with this issue,Leman embarks on a wide-ranging discussion ofmany of the thorny problems of traditional musiccognition, from the perspective of an embodiednotion of the human mind.

Book reviews 115

This discussion is clearly aimed at scholars, stu-dents and researchers, and its interdisciplinaryambition is stated in the preface, where Lemanincludes in his audience readers ‘with backgrounds inmusicology, philosophy, engineering, physics, psy-chology, and neuroscience’ (p. xi). With an eye tothe breadth of the readership here, Leman cautionsthat the book is ‘more a philosophical essay aboutthe foundations of music research and a journey intopossibilities rather than a survey of y empiricalresearch results y’ (p. xi). I suspect the philosophicalstuff and the journey into new possibilities are whatwe really want to read, but there are also some sub-stantial discussions of experimental data from anumber of key empirical studies. These provide thesort of insights that ground the more theoreticalmoments of the book, and they also allow us to testthe experimental methods in operation against therequirements of the philosophical and speculativediscussion. The enterprise of a ‘philosophical essay’implies certain aims and ambitions, and I think onehas to take the term ‘philosophical’ here in a parti-cular spirit; one which acknowledges the breadth ofthe ground plan and insights of this book, but whichalso points to some of its weaknesses.

Leman prepares the ground with a comprehensiveand perceptive overview of some of the basic con-cepts, issues and research ambitions of the field ofmusic cognition. The chapters on ‘Musical Experi-ence and Signification’ and ‘Paradigms of MusicResearch’ give a clear and engaging introduction tothe novice, but also to the expert since the discussionin these chapters is rooted in a specific issue ofmediation, framed immediately inside a very practicaland contemporary design problem: how does one‘find and retrieve the music one really wants to pur-chase’? Or, more broadly, what would it be to have a‘transparent mediation technology that relates musi-cal involvement directly to sound energy’? (p. 1)This framing of the discussion allows Leman themeans to get through a lot of material in a clear,succinct and engaging fashion, but it also encourageswhat seems to me to be the book’s main drawback,an overly reductionist and constraining view of whatwe mean by ‘technology’. Arnold Pacey, in his bookMeaning in Technology, proposes that machinesand technologies are, at their root, ways ‘to interpretthe world and give it meaning’ (Pacey 1999: 17).Leman is clearly aware of this turn of thought, andchapter one contains a veritable checklist of per-spectives on the formation of meaning in music, butnot on the ways technologies themselves are impli-cated in this meaning formation. The issue is therein the undercurrents of the discussion, but somehowit never surfaces to disturb the instrumental convic-tion that a sufficiently clever technology can some-how bridge ‘the gap between musical mind and

matter’; that ‘signification practice’ can somehowbe improved by new developments in philosophyor cognitive science to deliver better results – what-ever those might be. This seems to be where the‘philosophical’ approach falters a little, not in therange of the discussion, which is admirable, but inthe depth of consideration of the main elements ofthe argument: mediation, ecology, technology, mean-ing and so on. These terms have been the subject ofso much fruitful contention and elucidation that itseems a pity that they figure so economically inLeman’s thesis.

The real heart of the book is in the two middlechapters, ‘Corporeal Articulations and Intentionality’and ‘Interaction with Musical Instruments’. Here thegeneral idea is that human actions can be conceivedof as mediating between mind and matter. Thusgaining a better understanding of this mediationprocess is of crucial importance for the developmentof a technology, or technologies, which will assistpeople in their interactions with the ‘matter’ of digi-tally encoded music. In some respects this makessense, and provides a useful discursive background tosuch recent actual developments as the Nike1 phy-sical activity data connection to the iPod, or theMusinaut system, which aims to provide physiologi-cally appropriate background music to your dailycycle of moods and situations (http://www.musinaut.com). It also stands as the practical outcome ofLeman’s core assertion ‘that musical communicationis based on the sharing of neural structures thatpertain to movement’ (p. 161).

The argument Leman builds for this idea is clearand compelling, as is his view of its potential practicalimplications. However, the lightness of meaning in theterms of the discussion delivers what seems likeanother round of instrumental reductionism, andwhen we hear that this thesis ‘forms the power ofmusic as a universal language’ we must wonder whereall the discussions of ecology, sociological meaningformation and corporeal imitation actually got us.This is a pity since many of the difficulties that Lemanpoints to in the long-term project of music-technologyresearch – the development of meaningful tactilefeedback in performance interfaces, for instance –would seem to stand a better chance of getting some-where if the real insights of the philosophical discus-sions so far were properly brought into play (see forexample Pierre Schaeffer 1971).

The final chapter is an account of Leman’s ownresearch into search and retrieval systems for digitallyencoded music. This is a fascinating case study, andLeman’s technique of multi-modal querying – wherelinguistic, audio and physical items of informationare combined to provide a search interface – forms agood synthesis and exemplar of the main themes ofthe book.

116 Book reviews

This book is clearly compulsory reading for anyoneconcerned with music cognition or music technology.It has all the right topics in its sights, and it lays outthe field of research with exemplary clarity andengaging style and focus. Its deficiencies, though theyare at the heart of the discussion, have been a featureof thinking about music technology for most of thatdiscipline’s existence. There is clearly work still todo here, but Marc Leman’s contribution certainlypushes in the right direction.

REFERENCES

Pacey, Arnold. 1999. Meaning in Technology. Cambridge,MA: MIT Press.

Schaeffer, Pierre. 1971. A propos des ordinateurs. La revue

musicale 214–15: 55–65.Sloboda, John. 1985. The Musical Mind: The cognitive

psychology of music. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Peter Nelsonp.nelson@ed.ac.uk

Book reviews 117

respectively. Besides, the book often pays homage tothe usual references, such as Michel Chion.)

Much of the contents of the volume is intriguing,from Dana Milstein’s case study of anime fan videos,which will have you checking animemusicvideos.org,through Jem Kelly’s dissection of the modern multi-media pop concert and the Gorillaz in particular, to thefinal section encompassing website sound, young peo-ple’s attitudes to music, and the ubiquitous iPod study.Scholarship on video game music, as provided in sec-tion two by Rob Munday’s survey and Zach Whalen’ssemi-semiotic case study of Silent Hill, is a welcometerritory, and most definitely an important growtharea of academic engagement (nay-sayers here shouldlook up recent statistics on games sales versus thefilm industry, for example http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/apr/28/games.filmnews).

As it stands, Section Three’s dissection of Perfor-mance and Presentation is perhaps of most generalrelevance to this journal. Some interesting coverage ofsound art is provided by Jamie Sexton himself, witha certain bias to the Sonic Boom catalogue curatedby David Toop. Randolph Jordan’s ‘Case Study: FilmSound, Acoustic Ecology and Performance in Elec-troacoustic Music’ is as much as anything a selection ofattitudes to acousmatic music and diffusion, one hopesto the benefit of many media theorists!

The main omission in this book is a lack of coverageof live audiovisual practice in VJing or live cinema.The title might lead the reader to expect some, but theindex will disappoint, and a close reading will provethe absence, despite almost getting there on pages107–8 in a couple of oblique references to ‘audiovisualtechnologies’ and ‘contemporary technologies’. It maybe that a commissioned chapter was lost in the editingprocess; it happens. There are other sources for thisinformation, but the breadth of the book (whichis admittedly wide to begin with) would have beenfurther aided by this topic. It would also have beeninteresting to have seen the opposite asymptote to theacousmatic, visuals alone, covering for instance silentvisual music such as Fischinger’s Radio Dynamics.

A further list of quibbles could be presented, but,as per any edited volume, there is a natural variationin writing style and the odd infelicity must creep in toprovide character! Barthes, Baudrillard, Deleuze andGuattari are not to everyone’s taste, but fortunatelydo not appear in every chapter; Rob Munday makesmost use of them, also mixing in a little (inadequatelyreferenced) neuroscience too, in his personal theore-tical analysis of video game music. The ‘postmodernfield’ is still trod upon on p. 114 by Jem Kelly; it’sprobably quite a difficult field to ever escape usingthe meta-stile. At various locations throughout thebook, there is a tendency towards armchair philosophyand uncorroborated claims without further data orcitation as evidence. Whilst the theoretical contribution

of work throughout the volume is not particularlyground-breaking, and often just has the status ofreview, nevertheless some interesting points are pre-sented, including a salient discussion of NicholasCook’s theory of multimedia in Jamie Sexton’s intro-duction. In case it wasn’t already apparent, practicalinformation for artists is not really part of the book’smandate.

Best to review a copy yourself in a library orbookshop, or via Amazon’s Look Inside featurebefore purchase. There is something (happily?) quirkyabout this volume that makes it hard to review ina uniform sense, though I hesitate to use the word‘gallimaufry’ as per page 114. Depending on yourneeds, this book may provide some useful inputto projects concerning multimedia. Yet whilst TheResidents adorn the cover, you won’t find them inside;Resident Evil lurks there instead, and a host of otherunexpected, sometimes awkward and sometimesnourishing information.

Nick CollinsN.Collins@sussex.ac.uk

Nick Collins and Julio d’Escrivan (eds.), The CambridgeCompanion to Electronic Music. Cambridge University

Press, Cambridge, 2007. ISBN 978-0-521-68865-9

doi:10.1017/S1355771809000193

Part of the Cambridge Companion to Music bookseries, this recent offering attempts to provide aroadmap of the history, practice and current state ofelectronic music for the intelligent lay-person andstudents. By way of introduction, the promotionalblurb for the book notes:

Musicians are always quick to adopt and explore newtechnologies. The fast-paced changes wrought by elec-trification, from the microphone via the analogue syn-thesiser to the laptop computer, have led to a wide

diversity of new musical styles and techniques. Electronicmusic has grown to a broad field of investigation, takingin historical movements such as musique concrete and

elektronische Musik, and contemporary trends such aselectronic dance music and electronica. A fascinatingarray of composers and inventors have contributed to a

diverse set of technologies, practices and music. This bookbrings together some novel threads through this scene,from the viewpoint of researchers at the forefront of thesonic explorations empowered by electronic technology.

The chapters provide accessible and insightful overviewsof core topic areas and uncover some hitherto less pub-licised corners of worldwide movements. Recent areas of

intense activity such as audiovisuals, live electronic music,interactivity and network music are actively promoted.

The text provided a wonderful opportunity forpractitioners or theorists in the field to then engage

112 Book reviews

both interested laity and traditional musicians inelectronic music, many of who remained baffled bysome of the idiom’s lack of performance value, itsabstract nature, seeming lack of narrative structure,and sometimes confusing semiotic sense in relation-ship to other musical genres. Any opportunities onecan take to make the field more comprehensible andengaging to wider audiences should then be graspedenthusiastically, considered carefully, and deliveredastutely. While holding out promise and despite areasonable range of material, I wondered if this bookhad made full use of the opportunity.The upside of the book, although a good propor-

tion of the material is already covered in variousscattered texts, is that it allows one to read throughsomething of the spectrum of the field and appreciate itsdiversity. The weakness is that, as a whole, it strugglesto significantly come to terms with many of the centralissues that folk from outside the field often raise,such as the division between high culture and popularmusic, the asymmetrical development of technical andaesthetic dimensions, the lack of audience for moreexperimental forms in the idiom, and the segregation oftechnical and artistic approaches in the genre. Whilethere are parts of the book that begin to touch on someof these issues, providing refreshing interludes, thereis little sense of the whole being addressed beyondsummaries of some of the parts.Structurally, the book begins with a chronology of

the idiom, followed by an introduction by the editors.The text is then divided into three sections. Part Icovers electronic music in context in four chapters.Part II has six chapters on electronic music in prac-tice. Part III covers analysis and synthesis in threechapters. At the end of Part I there are fourteen shortartists’ statements, and there are a further sixteenartists’ statements at the end of Part II.The chronological overview at the beginning is a

reasonable attempt to be inclusive with the use ofpopular music as well ‘art music’ examples, and fromdifferent electronic music idioms. Although very useful,given the extensive on-line chronologies in areas ofpopular electronic music and electronic instrumentsthat are available, this could have been extend and abetter balance and range of material included.The introduction notes the wide range that the idiom

now covers. The editors (p. 2) suggest that ‘Given sucha vibrant tableau, this book can only attempt to surveyand analyse a proportion of the developments andinnovations’, and ‘we have tried to avoid duplicatingthe content that can be found in already well-knownbooks (a representative sample of which are includedat the end of this introduction)’. The range of bookspresented for further reading, however, could bebroader than indicated. In addition, acknowledged inthe introduction (p. 2) is ‘the manically communicat-ing world the target is moving quickly’. Perhaps this

should be an opportunity to concentrate on some ofthe broader integration issues raised above, rather thanget to bogged down in too much contemporary detail,which will date quickly. Finally, the ‘continua stretch’between ‘serious academic art music’ and ‘electronica’(p. 3) is mentioned, hinting that the issue might beexplored in broader terms in the text. However,although is mentioned in some of the chapter offerings,it is never fully developed.

The strength of this text is in some of the excellentindividual chapters, which present concise overviews ofthe aspects of the many byways of the idiom. AndrewHugill’s offering opens Part I (called ‘Electronic musicin context’), with a chapter titled ‘The origins of elec-tronic music’. This provides a broad and deep historicalsurvey, beautifully written with a fine balance of theo-retical and artistic underpinning. The chapter concludesin 1958 with Edgard Varese’s Poeme electronique.

Chapter two by Margaret Schedel, titled ‘Electro-nic music and the studio’, looks at issues arising fromthe democratic access to the new powerful computingequipment to make music that is now available. Toaddress these issues she interviewed practitionersof different ages, nationalities and experiences fromaround the world, with the aim of providing aninclusive overview. Beginning with historical and‘technology of aesthetics’ sections, the chapter dis-cusses accessibility, studio, community and perfor-mance issues. There are interesting insights here witha good depth of material. The chapter had greatpotential to be developed to deal with aspects of thelarger issues implicit in the field.

Nicolas Collins next contributes ‘Live electronicmusic’ as the book’s third chapter. This will probablybe of interest to art music composers as an area withwhich they may not be familiar. In all, it is a solidsurvey with good historical range, largely written infavour of the western academic tradition, despite theodd dip into the popular music tradition.

The final chapter of Part I is by Ge Wang, entitled‘A history of programming and music’. This is awide-ranging and substantial technical survey of theacademic field up to Wang’s own ChucK program-ming language.

At the end of Part I, one is left wondering why thesection is titled ‘Electronic Music in Context’. Anessay outlining the larger historical, political andsocial ‘context’ of electronic music as an art-formseems warranted here, as well as an extended chapteron aesthetic issues covering some of the debates thatare a part and parcel of the idiom. Further, a goodsurvey of electronic popular music, both analogueand digital, appears warranted as a balance to theother material presented.

At the end of the section is a collection of artists’statements that includes contributions from LaurieSpiegel, Yasunao Tone, John Oswald, Mathias Gmachl

Book reviews 113

(Farmer’s Manual), Erdem Helvacioglu, Pauline Oli-veros, Chris Jeffs, Rodrigo Sigal, Mira Calix, DenisSmalley, Seong-Ah Shin, Carsten Nicolai, WarrenBurt and Max Mathews. It may be difficult for readersto know what to make of these offerings in the con-text of the book. The statements are of differinglength, the writing style widely varied, there is little ofa common focus in the collection, and some of thestatements say little of significance beyond beingpromotional blurbs. There are, however, one or twogems here. For example, Denis Smalley’s contribu-tion is worthy of an extended chapter on aesthetics/acousmatic music as a contribution to the book, andWarren Burt’s very short but insightful offering criesout for further development.

Part II of the book has a focus on ‘Electronic musicin practice’. Chapter five, ‘Interactivity and live com-puter music’ by Sergi Jorda, is another in-depth his-torical survey of the field, but again largely learningtowards an art music approach. Three later sectionsdeal with some of the associated aesthetic issues,including where we might be heading in the idiom, withclarity, insight and concision. The balance here ofaesthetic, technical and philosophical in the last parts isexcellent. The chapter is a refreshing grapple with someof the big issues, in contrast to a summary of the facts.

Karlheinz Essl covers ‘Algorithmic composition’ ina well-rounded historical survey with a clear linefound through the material. David Cope’s book NewDirections in Music also covers part of this territory,but this is an interesting extension. A discussion onthe balance of technological and aesthetic develop-ments would also have been welcome here.

Chapter seven covers ‘Live audiovisuals’ by AmyAlexander and Nick Collins. This is a refreshingchange in context, as it is an area that many academicelectronic music practitioners many not have aworking knowledge of. The wide-ranging discussion,part historical survey, is best covering the recent pastfrom both art music and popular fields. Appreciatedwas a final section considering some possibleapproaches to the theoretical analysis of audiovisualworks. Given the balance here, it is something of amodel that other chapters could have emulated.

‘Network music’ is the title of chapter eight byJulian Rohrhuber, an area that has been well docu-mented in the literature with Gil Weinberg’s extensivesurveys on the topic. It contrast, this chapter is not asbroad or focused as the topic suggests.

Julio d’Escrivan next contributes ‘Electronic musicand the moving image’ in chapter nine. Again, thisis an area that is well documented in the literature,particularly in popular music. The survey here is wideranging but somewhat idiosyncratic in comparison.However, the chapter provides a balance in the book’scollection that is often overlooked in other texts onelectronic music, and will be of interest to many.

Chapter ten by Nick Collins covers ‘Musical robotsand listening machines’. This will be an engagingchapter for many readers, and the line taken throughthe field might usefully be extended with a summary ofmore recent work taking place in artificial intelligence.

The section ends with the second collection of artists’statements, including those of Kevin Saunderson,Kanta Horio, Donna Hewitt, Alejandro Vinao, Bub-blyfish, Barry Truax, Lukas Ligeti (Burkina Electric),Christina Kubisch, Murat Ertel, Adina Izarra, Cybork,Francis Dhomont, David Behrmann, Kevin Blechdom(Kristin Erickson), Karlheinz Stockhausen and GeorgeE. Lewis.

As with the first group of artists, it was difficult tosee why this collection of people were drawn together,given the range of practising artists that might beinvited to contribute from both the art music andpopular music fields. Further, many of the statementsadd little in terms of insight, and some are poorlywritten. Scattered throughout, although infrequently,are some wonderful insights. A tighter writing briefseemed warranted. Alejandro Vinao touches onissues that are worthy of being developed into anextended essay, perhaps in a fourth section of thebook, entitled ‘Philosophical Issues’. Barry Truax’swork also begs development as a separate chapter. Itseems a pity that Stockhausen is afforded such lim-ited space, and Francis Dhomont’s contribution alsobegs extension.

Part III, which concludes the book, is titled ‘Ana-lysis and synthesis’, and is covered in three chapters.The title here does not seem to reflect the range ofmaterial that it might contain, with no contributionon the analysis of electroacoustic music, for example.Further, the last and outstanding chapter is largelyfocused on sociological and aesthetic issues.

Chapter eleven by Stefania Serafin is on ‘Computergeneration and manipulation of sound’. Writtenlargely from an engineering perspective and leaningtoward academic approaches, is a reasonable surveyof generation, but issues of manipulation might havebeen extended and an aesthetic underpinning addedto lend wider interest.

Petri Toiviainen’s contribution in chapter twelvecovers ‘The psychology of electronic music’, and is amasterly walk through mainstream material. Recentwork on reception studies in electronic music mayhave been useful here also.

The chapter on ‘Trends in electroacoustic compo-sition’ is by Natasha Barrett. Finally, we arrive at asubstantial discussion that provides a framework toapproach many of the larger issues that could havebeen addressed more directly throughout the book.The discussion is wide ranging, clear, perceptiveand refreshing – covering philosophical and aestheticissues – and begins addressing something of thedivide between popular music and art music.

114 Book reviews

I approached this review with some apprehension.It is a fine balancing act between being supportive ofone’s colleagues and their genuine efforts to promotethe field, and also acting as a critical arbitrator ofwhether an opportunity to explain our field to othershad been fully grasped. Overall, there is a substantialcollection of material here to engage the reader.Structurally, however, it is difficult to see why someof the essays fell into the three divisions given thematerial that is presented in each section. Further,there are some potential sectional topics that seem tobe neglected. Both of the artists’ statement sectionsseemed to be problematic. It may have been betterhere to put forward a few focused interviews with abalanced selection of major practitioners across theart music and popular music fields.Of passing concern was that some of the major

academics and practitioners who could have writtenwell on topics that are covered in the book are absent.Further, given the extensive material accumulated injournals such as CUP’s own Organised Sound andPopular Music, MIT’s The Computer Music Journaland Leonard Music Journal, and conference pro-ceeding such as NIME and ICMC that could bedrawn on, there are some surprising omissions in thebibliography provided.To my mind, in the history of technology and music,

pivotal points rely on the coming together of uniquepractitioners as storytellers, the use of simple and robustalgorithms to generate material implemented through anew technology that can be commonly shared, towardsreflecting a current or changing social situation. Thereare moments in electronic music, both art music andpopular, where these factors have coincided, and theidiom has been integrated with the narrative traditionsmany share. Some of these points of integration arecovered well in the book, and a wider consideration ofpopular music would have covered others.At the same time, constant experimentation is a

healthy and necessary part of any ongoing process,and the book reflects something of the fractionatednature of the later digital music discovery process.For example, we have many standardised tools, butan emerging sonic language that is not widely shared;some clear intellectual understandings of the processof making sounds, but a less clear understanding ofhow our narrative bodies try and make sense of thenew sonic offering in the idiom.A main concern, however, is that the book as a

whole partly pulls its punches, missing something ofthe opportunity to take a balanced overall view anddeal directly with some of the larger current issuesthat are integral to the idiom: something an intelligentlay-person or conventional musician may still beg for.

Ian Whalleymusik@waikato.ac.nz

Marc Leman, Embodied Music Cognition and Media-tion Technology. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA,

and London, 2008. ISBN 978-0-262-12293-1

doi:10.1017/S1355771809000168

The human science of music certainly seems to bea hot topic right now. The publication in quicksuccession of Daniel Levitin’s This is Your Brain onMusic and Oliver Sacks’ Musicophilia: Tales of Musicand the Brain, has brought discussions of the natureof music cognition and its medical and neuro-physical manifestations to a wide audience, and hasreminded us, if we needed reminding, that music in allits forms and consequences is one of the central issuesin human life. Both these books, together withLevitin’s more recent The World in Six Songs, takethe embodied nature of musical activity for granted,at least in their parallel fascination with the workingsof the human brain, in sickness or in health. How-ever, most of the more specialist investigations intomusic cognition to date have come from anotherethos, where cognition is viewed as a more abstractedattempt to get at the logical systems ‘behind’ thehuman involvement with music, and frequently totest them through implementations in computersoftware. In his important and comprehensive bookThe Musical Mind: The cognitive psychology of music,John Sloboda puts it like this,

Cognitive psychology occupies a vital pivotal positionbetween the extremes because both ‘biologists’ and

‘sociologists’ identify individual human thought andaction as the ‘given’ which requires explanation. The‘neutral’ cognitive psychologist attempts to articulate

the structure of human thought and action in a way thatleaves aside the question of cause – biological or social.

Sloboda 1985: 240

For some time now, both cognitive science per seand its philosophical underpinnings have beenundergoing a big change, with a number of challengesto this viewpoint taking a more physicalist, embodiedapproach. Thus it is good to see Marc Leman in hismost recent book, Embodied Music Cognition andMediation Technology, taking on these developmentsand applying their insights to issues of music cogni-tion. The main focus of the book is one highlypractical issue: how can we deal with the wealth ofdigitally encoded music now available to us in effi-cient and intuitive ways? This is clearly a matter ofimport to the iPod and mobile phone generation, andto the growing industrial base intent on deliveringmusic to us in a manner engaging enough to thwartillegal downloading. In order to deal with this issue,Leman embarks on a wide-ranging discussion ofmany of the thorny problems of traditional musiccognition, from the perspective of an embodiednotion of the human mind.

Book reviews 115

Sound and movie examples – issue 14(1)

Sound and Movie examples from issue 14(1) can be found online at the journal’s website: http://www.journals.cambridge.org/OSO. Examples for the whole volume will be supplied on DVD with issue 14(3).

Owen Chapman

The Icebreaker: Soundscape work as everyday sound art2 Movie examples and 1 Sound exampleMovie examplesMovie example 1: The Icebreaker (Frozen Puddle) – 203600 (excerpt from a work lasting 3000000)movie example 2: The Icebreaker (The Ice Xylophone) – 300700 (excerpt from a work lasting 30000’’)Sound exampleSound example 1: O. Chapman, S. Binet Audet, K. Audet, D. Madden, Improvisation with Ice Xylophone,Ondes Martenot, Laptop and Guitar – 703500

Virginia Madsen

Cantata of Fire: Son et lumiere in Waco Texas, auscultation for a shadow play5 Sound examples from Cantata of FireSound example 1: ‘The Lament for King David’ – 101300 (Singer – Mina Kanaridis)Sound example 2: ‘A Sign from God’ – 101300

Sound example 3: ‘The Prophecy’ – 202100

Sound example 4: ‘Possessed’ – 303100

Sound example 5: ‘The Final Movement: The Mystery’ – 604400

Technical production – John Jacobs, Sound Direction – Tony MacGregor and Virginia Madson, Voicedirection and Executive producer – Tony MacGregor ABCRadio, Australia. Voices – Jenny Vuletic, Lucy Bell,Deborah Pollard, Richard Moore, Peter Carroll.

Georg Klein

Site-Sounds: On strategies of sound art in public space3 Movie examples (all excerpts from the DVD georg klein – works on sound and video, 2007)Movie example 1: Site-Sound Marl Midtown (Ortsklang Marl Mitte) – 201700

Movie example 2: meta.stases (meta.stasen) – 205100

Movie example 3: towersounds.2: Watch Tower (turmlaute.2: Wachturm) – 603100

Organised Sound 14(1): 119 & 2009 Cambridge University Press. Printed in the United Kingdom. doi:10.1017/S1355771809000181