Sounding Spaces, Listening Bodies

By Ellen Moffat

How listeners experience reverberation depends on whether the environment is primarily a social, navigational, aesthetic or musical space.

Barry Blesser and Linda-Ruth Salter[i]

Sound moves through the body as a physical vibration and a tangible felt experience that brings us back to our corporeality and reminds of our connectivity to our world. We need this. Technically sound production can be completed with relative ease. Perhaps this helps to explain the proliferation of sound in contemporary artistic production. But a deeper impulse than means and currency may be at play, namely a call for a renewal of embodiment and wholeness.

Sound art is rooted in the visual arts. It emerges as an art form as one chapter in the history of modernist art starting in the 1960s with the shift of emphasis from the art object to spatiality and relational engagement, performance-based practices, spatial experience and locational practices that were part of the formal and philosophical investigations of John Cage, Happenings, Fluxus and Minimalism. These movements and artists focused on questions of how work shapes its immediate environment, kinesthetic rather than visual affects, the democratization of audience’s mode of engagement, interdisciplinary crossovers, renegotiation of art and life, heightened sensory awareness and phenomenological experience.

Looking further back into the rearview mirror, developments in music extended the vocabulary and perception of that canon. French composer Edgard Varése (1883-1965) was responsible for broadening the definition of music to include all organized sound. John Cage (1912-1992) expanded the definition to include silence. Cage is credited with liberating sound from conventions and music by drawing attention to the larger context in which music occurs. He shattered the musical object with everyday sound, the consequences of which was a merger of musical and found sound, “ making music a cultural paradigm beholden to sound and its situatedness.”[ii]

In “Sound Art?” written in 2000, musician and sound artist Max Neuhaus (1939-2009) rejected the category “sound art” as having little to do with either sound or art.[iii] He criticized visual art institutions in the early 1980s and early ‘90s for including “anything which has or makes sound” in exhibitions resulting in “most often what is selected is simply music or diverse collection of musics with a new name.” He questioned whether “sound art” constituted a new art form and called for the refinement of distinctions. For him, sound art needed to go beyond the limits of music and develop new art forms as an aesthetic inquiry. When (and if) this happened, new words would need to be invented. Ironically Neuhaus has been labeled as a sound artist, a label he tried to shake off through his life, without success.[iv]

As an alternative, Neuhaus coined the term ‘sound installation’ to describe sound works that were neither music nor events.

 

In terms of classification, I’d move the [sound] installation into the purview of the visual arts even though they have no visual component, because the visual arts, in the plastic sense, have dealt with space. Sculptors define and transform space. I create, transform, and change space by adding sound.[v]

 

Neuhaus held that our perception of place depends on what we hear, as much as what we see. His work utilized a given social and aural context as a foundation to build a new perception of place with sound. In the 1960s he organized promenades that came to be know as “lecture demonstrations” promoted through word-of-mouth with itineraries and schedules that he determined; he stamped the word ‘LISTEN’ on people’s hands then led tours through industrial and immigrant neighbourhoods with no commentary; the walks concluded in solo concerts in his studio. Times Square (1977-92 and 2002-present) is a sound installation located on a pedestrian island in New York City. The sound is a humming sound of varying frequencies that emerge from beneath the gratin of a subway ventilator shaft on a traffic island. The sound is subtle and its mode of address informal – the site is unmarked. Rather than creating a confrontation or a monument, Times Square is a minor interruption in the everyday noisy urban environment. The work increases private awareness within a public site as a democratic gesture: It is both there and not there for those who happen to focus on it.

Neuhaus distinguished between music and sound installation as a difference in the relationship with space or time. Music is distinctly time-based; it has definite beginning and end times. Sound art is spatially located; sound works are without beginning or end points. While sound art does include temporal elements, its ends are manifest in spatial terms. Sound art projects can be sited in (public) space rather than in the conventional frame of musical presentations.

Two recent sound projects at PAVED Arts in Saskatoon continue the dialogue of relationship of sound and space, and of aurality and visuality. Annie Martin’s Untitled and Thomas Bégin’s Larsen Surf-Mixing Plan Model are sound installations. Both projects employ live sound in the gallery setting.

Martin’s Untitled was a site-specific multi-channel installation using a live feed of sound with four microphones positioned on corners of the building’s roof outside the gallery. The signal was relayed to four channels that were split and distributed to multiple small low fidelity speakers positioned around the four walls inside the gallery. Gallery visitors were immersed in an environment of low-level ambient sound that mapped the outside world as a Cagean gesture of everyday sound as music.

The work was a subtle poetic intervention into space with a strong visual component. Listening was the dominant mode of engagement, although visitors needed to make the effort. Speakers were attached directly onto the gallery walls at about waist height suggesting a horizon line. The audio cables functioned like a drawing element—the cables danced over and under speakers accenting the linear alignment of the speakers as a visual indulgence.

Martin describes her intention and production:

… my works place focus on the moment of embodied perception, extending that moment into an opportunity for deeper reflection. Events such as marks, sounds and actions are distanced from their context in an act of abstraction that does not sever their relationship to the everyday world from which they arise, yet frees these events from a referential framework. In this way representation, figuration and narrative and political interpretation emerge as the creation of the viewer-perceiver, and the very nature of these structures and forms is also made available to contemplation.[vi]

 

Not all the technological components were visible. I learned about the existence and location of the roof-top microphones and a mixing board at an artist’s talk. Knowing technical aspects of the work enhanced my experience and understanding of the work. Without knowledge of the technological relays, the sound was detached from a specific locale. Knowledge of the technological process positioned and defined the work as a spatialized sound map of the outside world in which the occasional truck, vehicle horns and sirens passed through the gallery (and my mind). I was able to decipher spatial and incidental relations between actions and sound of outside and inside with their spatial transposition.

Martin’s work is experimental and speculative, driven by exploration, research into novel situations and discovery through the act of making. Her ideas develop from her lived experience including fleeting daily encounters that defy language or have no measurable value. Most recently, she has been exploring the ethical dimension of perceptual sensitivity and pleasure, particularly the aural, visual, touch and haptic, and the formation of a sense of self and locality through perception. She is also aware of the problematics of gender but ultimately thinks that the feeling self is always a gendered self, and perhaps a racial and economic self.[vii]

Thomas Bégin transformed the gallery into a sound box and host for Larsen Surf-Mixing Plan Model, an instrument that was based on the principle of an oscillating electro-mechanical system.

The model worked with the renewal principle of the feedback phenomenon, using the system’s own architecture to develop and maintain sonic schemes.

Bégin constructed an extended instrument using three electrical guitars, colored string, elastic bands, plastic clips, amplifiers, a C-stand and wall-mounted speakers. He directed vibrations emanating from the speaker cone directly on the guitar strings, creating a “mechanical feedback system” that operated on the physical premise of an electronic oscillator. A complex of wires ran between different speakers and guitar strings constituting a ìnetî (host for a network) that interfered with, or enhanced the signal. The network of vibrating and pulsing wires produced a continuously shifting waveform using a positive feedback system—Larsen Feedback–named after its Danish inventor. In this system positive feedback occurs when a sound loop exists between an audio input—a microphone or guitar pickup—and an audio output. The effects of a small disturbance are increased in magnitude. The modified sounds took on the life of a moving pattern.[viii]

Participants generated sound through direct interaction with the instrument. As a participant and listener, I thoroughly enjoyed the exploration required by the project. I needed to experiment with making sound to discover the system through an empirical process. The system was not easily evident; there were no directives or set of instructions within the installation. And I liked this. As a consequence I gave up my rational analytical mind that called for causality and simply indulged in the work. I stopped playing. After a period of time the instrument became silent and dormant, ready for the next participant. Or so I assumed. Several minutes later as I was leaving the gallery, the work erupted into sound. The renewal principle of the feedback phenomenon had used the system’s own architecture to maintain sonic schemes. I was delighted.

Bégin’s project reflects DIY experimentation with production, straddles music and sound installation as an artistic form and gives access to “everyman.” The work challenged my expectations. For me several questions arose in relation to the dialogue of sound/music, humans/technology and agency/systems. To what extend do participants play the instrument? Or do they simply trigger a system that plays itself? If the latter is true, participants transfer authorship to a technological system. Alternately perhaps a feedback system uses technology as its agent. Depending on the answer (if there is a single answer), what does this imply for us humans?

The projects of Martin and Bégin engage with space and sound with different means. Martin’s work emphasizes listening as a sensorial and felt experience that explores embodied perception using outdoor sound as source material. Her work references Cage’s use of everyday sound as source material for sound as well as Neuhaus’ use of sound without beginning or end. Bégin invites participation to generate sound through direct action; then the complex feedback system takes over as a sound generator. His work is durational but it is not music according to Neuhaus’ definition of the musical idiom. It lacks the temporal structure of beginnings and ends.

In contesting the term “sound art”, Neuhaus called for precision about terminology for forms of art, aesthetics and life. His focus was the individual within the social realm. Sound installation is situated at the intersection of architecture, spatiality, environmental situation, the body and the mind. The listener (or player) is positioned inside a complex space of aurality and visuality defined by the general relation of the found and the constructed. The exchange of acoustical experience is reciprocal.

Sound installation aims for a space of sound rather than a time of music by attending to perception. Sound tells us about spaces, indoor and outdoor. We know sound through vibrations through our bodies, not just our ears. A live sound feed from an exterior space to an interior space reduces the walls that separate these spaces. An interactive instrument invites participation to make sound. The engagement is about more than independent agency. An unpredictable feedback loop suggests that we do not control our environment. We are individuals with a social context.

 

Our perception of space depends as much on what we hear as what we see. [ix]

 

 

Ellen Moffat is a media installation artist whose work explores site, sound and space using fragmented multi-channel sound, text and image. She is currently exploring methods and strategies for sound generation as interactive co-creation. She is based in Saskatoon.

 

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