Artist Soundwork and the Sonic Environment
Sound Art: Artists using sound in a creative way - usually abstract and not relating to music.
Sound can transform a space and your experience in it.
F.T Marinetti
Member of the Futurist movement (1909) which is the celebration of technology and Modern Warfare. Until WW1 when many of the futurist changed their opinion due to deaths etc.
Marinetti wrote a poem of his experience of the war consisting of onomatopoeia.
In 1913 Luigi Russolo wrote a manifesto entitled 'The Art of Noise'. Which basically told people to appreciate the sound around them, rather than taking it for granted. Left would be much better if we appreciated everyday sounds.
Russolo went on to create 27 machines called 'The Noise Intoners' which each represented a different industrial sound. In 1914 he performed around Europe 14 times in various concert halls. He accompanied the noise intoners with an orchestra. The audiences were outraged.
In the 1950's an artist name John Cage started researching the art of sound. He was mostly interested in silence and if it even exists. He did radical experimentation with electronic music and questioned at what point does sound become music.
In 1957 he did a piece called '4 minutes 33' which was nicknamed 'The Silent Piece'. Which suggested there was no such thing as sound.
He then visited the anechoic chamber at Harvard University. Which really did prove there is no such thing as silence as he could hear his own nervous system and blood pumping.
Sight is our primary sense. We don't tend to notice noise unless its not quite right: when our Sonic Environment is disrupted.
Bill Fontana researched this further. It was sort of similar to Duchamp's readymades in the sense he took ordinary objects and put them in a gallery, Fontana took samples of sound and put them somewhere else, then studied peoples engagement with this.
Examples of his work include:
Sound Island - took sounds from the coastline and played it at the Arc De Triumph
Oscillating Steel grids along the Brooklyn Bridge
Distant Trains - Played live sounds from Cologne train station at the ruins of Berlin train station.
Kirribilli Wharf - blacked out room with a sound piece playing in it. When sight is taken sound becomes your predominant sense.
Max Neuhaus did something similar in Times Square projecting sound from the vent of the subway. This was first exhibited in 1977-1992 but was reinstalled in 2002 and still remains there now.
Gerald Newman wanted sound to have a context of its own. He wanted people to engage with sound like they do a painting. But you only get a fraction of a sound piece, whereas your in control of how long you look at a painting for.
Brain Eno created the term Ambient music. Which has changed meaning since. But his definition what music that fit with its atmosphere/surrounding influence.
He did a piece for an airport that work worked with the natural sounds around it. Not to mask them or interfere with them but to fit inbetween them.
La Mont Young was interested in Minimalist music. And created the drone. Which was basically one note played for a long period of time. He went on to form the 'Theatre of Internal Music'. Who made the drone with different intruments, changing peoples experience of the space they were in.
Terry Riley who studied with a classical Indian musician as Young did created music using repetition. He gave an orchestra a choice of 53 patterns all in the key of C, for each musician to choose there own. Then they all played there chosen pattern together.
Velvet Underground - managed by Andy Warhol were heavily influenced by La Mont Young and the use of the drone. They combined it with pop/ Bob Dylan influenced songs.
There is a more modern group of artists in Japan named Ankyo. They tend to play instruments without the necessary components to make sound, for example turntables woth no records in them. Some of the artists also used very low/quiet sounds that were on for that long they eventually seemed loud. Coincidentally the 'Off-site Gallery' in Tokyo where a lot of sound art took place was in a residential area, and so to avoid noise complaints they had to make quiet pieces.
An artist associated with this group is Toshimary Nakamura. He rejects self expression and feels as though his life has a constant information overload and his work reflects this.
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