In the tumult of listening to the content of words, it is easy to forget that the voice is also a physical sound. The same voice that whispers can also sing, emanating both externally from the body or suggested within the mind as a memory or thought.

The ‘universe of voices’ under examination by the works in the exhibition Voices, mounted in 1998 at Rotterdam’s Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, acknowledges this complicated double dualism of public and private speaking, as well as the role of the voice as both metaphor and material in contemporary art practice.

Voices functions not only as the title of the exhibition, but also as the theme, hinting at an implicit plurality. Christopher Philips’ curatorial strategy embraces the polyvalent and labyrinthine nature of the topic by recognizing that a voice is, for the artists included here, both beautiful and complicated. Voices evoked by text, video, installation, sculpture, and photography are placed in dialog with the attendees and in turn with each other as the differences in media highlight the common ground between the varied treatments of the body-instrument that brings forth speech.

Many of the issues brought to bear by the voice are easily discussed by reading through Gary Hill’s now canonized single-channel video, Mediations, which was a center-piece of the exhibition. In this piece, Hill presents the viewer/listener with a single, un-moving camera shot facing downwards vertically towards a bare speaker cone.  The speaker cone is lying horizontally with the cone facing the camera just to the edges of the frame.  A narrator begins to speak slowly, constructing phrase after phrase emphasizing both the sound semiotic meaning of language simultaneously:

Transcription of Spoken Text:

speak

speak er

err aahh

a voice

a voice speaks out

out loud

a loudspeaker lauds the voice

out loud

out of bounds from the picture

a picture of a speaker etc…

A hand enters the picture, cupped and full of sand. The sand is slowly and carefully poured onto the bare loudspeaker. In so doing, it is revealed through vibration that, even though we cannot see the narrator, we are looking at the loudspeaker from which his voice emanates.  The process takes three and a half minutes, each new phrase filling the loudspeaker with handful after handful of sand until slowly the sound of his speaking voice becomes obscured.  The vibration of the loudspeaker is responsible for the delivery of the voice; the introduction of the sand slowly masks that voice, covering the sound the way the image of the sand covers the speaker. By introducing the first handful of sand, Hill draws a casual relationship between voice and vibration that forms a subject identification with the narrator. The bare speaker cone further articulates the weight of authority inherent to voice-over narration in this work, exposing the relationship between the speaking voice and the loudspeaker presenting a disembodied sound. In this disembodiment the voice is doubly present: as a sound emanating from the loudspeaker depicted on screen and as a sound radiating from the television that displays the video. Each depicted repetition of the process of covering the speaker further obscures this double presence of the voice simultaneously revealing the potential fallibility of the loudspeaker to deliver sound and eliminating the power of the off-screen narrator. Not unlike Alvin Lucier’s contemporaneous audio work I Am Sitting in a Room, the physical properties of the medium-specific condition begin an erasure of the subject of the recording.

The unblinking eye of the video camera observes the unfolding scene and through the immobility of its movement the camera gains the listeners trust as a literal point-of-view.  The opening vocal exclamation of the single word ‘speak,’ complicates the audio-visual convention that has trained viewers to hear an off-screen narrator as an authority figure by rendering the text as both description and command. When the narrator repeats ‘speak’ this impression is solidified and the expectations of the cinematic convention are met. However, as the narrator adds an ‘er’ to ‘speak’ not only does language begin to break down to its component sounds (words to their component phonemes) but the authority of the narrator breaks down in kind. This disintegration is cemented by the next ‘err ahh’ (nearly a stutter, a non-linguistic or pure-sound utterance) that prepares us for ‘a voice’ and reminds us that we are not just hearing a voice, nor hearing a speaker but ‘hearing a voice from the speaker.’ In a way, this mise-en-scene presents the loudspeaker itself learning to speak, but as the piece continues we learn that video as a medium becomes aware that it can make sound and has a voice of its own.

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Seth Cluett (b. 1976, Troy, NY) is an artist, performer, and composer whose work ranges from photography, and drawing to video, sound installation, concert music, and critical writing.

Oto-date and ki-date are terms coined by Japanese sound artist Akio Suzuki.  The first is a combination of o-date, the term for a tea ceremony held outdoors; and oto,the word for sound.  The second term combines no-date with ki, a word which can mean spirit, energy, or body center.*

As with no-date, an oto-date takes place outdoors.  Through the improvised act of walking and listening, Suzuki finds spots where he stands still, hands behind his back or cupped behind his ears, and listens.  He then marks the spot with a pair of footprints that resemble ears – or perhaps a pair of ears that resemble footprints – surrounded by a circle.  The toes of the feet(ears) correspond to the direction he faced while listening.  If a particular spot is on concrete or blacktop, he makes his icon with a spraypaint stencil; grassy spots are marked by specially made tiles, stamped with the distinctive listening feet.

The spraypainted icons don’t really look like graffiti; they much more closely resemble a cross between official street signage and the non-linguistic pictograms of a museum guide.  The icons communicate their purpose with brilliant economy; so economical are they that it may take a viewer a moment to realize that the feet are also ears.  But once that anatomical confluence is grasped it’s clear what our instructions are: stand right here and listen.

An oto-date is intended to be stumbled upon by others after Suzuki has left: in his cartoon illustrations he likes to depict himself as a mischievous cat, leaving the marks and then leaving the scene.  They are invitations to a private outdoor ceremony of one.

There’s no way for Suzuki to know what we will hear when we stand on the feet-ears. Is his intention for us to listen to something specific? Or simply to point out a soundhearing (as distinct from sightseeing) destination?  He can’t control how the environment will perform for us when we find the icon and stand on it.  But he can indicate how we are to perform his little score, with our standing feet and our listening ears.  We stand there as audience (audients), but he’s not setting us up to be his audience – he is setting us up to be almost literally in his shoes, to identify with Suzuki-the-listener.  He presents us a piece of listening art for us to finish.  The marks on the ground are a score for us to perform, to create a listening piece for ourselves, and the phenomenal substance of that piece will be determined by the instrument (our ears) and the setting.  He gives us setting and instruction, just as a composer would.  We bring the instrument and realize the piece.

*From email correspondence with Prof. Tomie Hahn, 30 Oct 2010. This essay drawns mainly from Akio Suzuki: Ki-Date, the catalog book and DVD from a 2009 Suzuki exhibition at Ichinomiya City Memorial Art Museum of Setsuko Migishi.

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Mike Bullock is a composer, performer, visual artist, and writer living in Boston, MA. He is a member of The BSC (an improvising ensemble led by Bhob Rainey), the trio Mawja (with Mazen Kerbaj and Vic Rawlings) and in the sound & light duo rise set twilight (with Linda Aubry Bullock).

Photos by Bryan Derballa

For years, performers of electronic music have been resigned to having their sound reproduced in boring ‘ol stereo. Two boxes, left and right, turn out a representation of music that some feel cannot compare to the multi-dimensional quality of an acoustic instrument. The resolution to this dilemma lies in a series of hemispherical speakers which hang from the ceiling in Brooklyn NY’s Issue Project Room. Stephan Moore, a former sound engineer and music coordinator for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and the current curator of  the annual Floating Points Festival at Issue, is the artist responsible for building and installing these contraptions, and extending an invitation to musicians who wish to come in and perform multi-channel, immersive sound works that can only be realized using this unique playback system. In the first part of a two-part interview, I spoke with Stephan about the ideas behind the speakers, and how they came to be.

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Howard Stelzer: You built those hemispherical speakers for your own work, is that right? Tell me what gave you the idea, what problem did you have in mind that only round speakers could solve?

Stephan Moore: Ah yes, the origin of the speakers.  The idea of spherical sound radiation is not new, there seems to have been a few different models on the market briefly in the 1970s and 1980s, though I found out about those after we first made ours.  I have a lot of people to credit with the development and evolution of the speakers. The story begins in 1997 at Princeton University, where Perry Cook, a brilliant musician and computer scientist, set out to do a research project with Dan Trueman, one of his graduate students.   Perry and Dan called their research project “N-Body,” and the idea was to create a sound amplification system for hard-body electric instruments (like Dan’s electric violin) that would give the sound a more realistic presence.  They went about this by surrounding an instrument, such a violin, with twelve microphones, positioned as though there was one microphone in the center of each surface of a dodecahedron, with the violin at the center.   They would strike the violin with a force hammer to collect an impulse response recording from each microphone.  Then, they built an approximation of a 12-sided speaker out of two metal Ikea salad bowls and played a dry electric violin sound out all 12 speakers, with each speaker’s signal convolved with the impulse response collected by the corresponding microphone.  The hypothesis was that, by doing this, the speaker would aurally come to life as tsomething closer to the acoustic instrument– you’d be able to hear where the f-holes were, and how the vibrations rolled off of the back of the instrument, and so on.  In actuality, it turned out not to be so revolutionary.  So they wrote a paper and moved on.

by MIKE BULLOCK

Swiss musicians Andy Guhl and Norbert Möslang formed the duo Voice Crack in 1972. At first, they played entirely acoustic improvisation on reed instruments and percussion, gradually incorporating electronics into their performances until they were performing with electronics exclusively. Voice Crack used the phrase “cracked everyday electronics” to describe their constantly shifting and growing instrumental resources: familiar sound-making devices such as turntables, tape machines, radios, piezo contact microphones, and long wires strung across rooms and played with violin bows and sticks.

By the late 1980s, Voice Crack was a primary moving force in the popularization of low-cost, low-fidelity electronics as source and instigator of improvised sound making. In Peter Liechti’s 1989 documentary film Kick That Habit, Guhl, Möslang, and their collaborators are shown performing in concerts and room-sized sound installations, but from the very beginning, the movie focuses on the musicians’ engagement with creating sound in their everyday lives. The musicians are shown actively engaging with the sonic environment of their town in Switzerland. Many of these pedestrian sound making activities are filled with performative intention: little clusters of rhythm and gesture reminiscent of rock drumming, rather than simply activating a medium and allowing it to sound itself. In the DVD, their sonic/performative engagement with the environment is made even more idiosyncratic by their unglamourous settings – trailer parks and scrap metal yards – set against the visually stunning backdrop of the Swiss Alps.

The opening of the movie shows Voice Crack playing on a miniature golf course for the sake of exploring the sounds made by the course’s various tricks and traps. In another scene, the duo and their friends are seen sitting around a dinner table, the act of serving and eating food highly amplified by piezos and room microphones. The meal is reminiscent of John Cage’s 0’00”, in which the performer undertakes any organized action, highly amplified. But it is both more and less than that. Voice Crack seems uninterested in anyone’s instructions about how to amplify to the quotidian. They play openly with the distinction between performance and concept – contact microphones and noise circuits are built into pieces of fruit as they are being served; cups are slammed dramatically on the table after drinking in a way that suggests both a hearty toast and a guileless, even obtuse, performative action.

This kind of homespun approach to making one’s own sounding environment within the existing environment, using redeployed and makeshift objects, can be traced at least as far back as Pauline Oliveros’ reworking of her home recording studio into a room-sized instrument, soup ladles and all (e.g. 1959’s Time Perspectives). With Voice Crack, we see a move towards portability of means, a continuous process of accumulating and shedding sonic resources as materials become available and the practitioners’ interests wander intuitively, with improvisation as the dominant mode of practice. A performer of the sound environment has taken on a new role of managing how the components of the environment interact, finding new intersections, and exploiting the potentials of those interactions. No longer expected to be the master of one tool, s/he has taken on a new role of managing how the components of the built environment interact, finding new intersections, and exploiting the potentials of those interactions. The performing musician’s domain shifts from tool user, to tool maker, to environmental engineer.

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Mike Bullock is a composer, performer, visual artist, and writer living in Boston, MA. He and is a member of The BSC (an improvising ensemble led by Bhob Rainey), the trio Mawja (with Mazen Kerbaj and Vic Rawlings) and in the sound & light duo rise set twilight.

by MIKE BULLOCK

The intent of this bi-weekly column, Drinking Water in the Crosswalk, is to delineate the branches, roots, and vines that run through and connect twenty-first century sound practices.  Noise, sound art, freely improvised music, electroacoustic music, phonography – everything that can be put under the umbrella of self-idiomatic music – all grow together through their communities of makers and supporters.  I will attempt to trace the connections of thought, decision-making, and histories, not in order to define these forms, but to understand the growth patterns. – Mike Bullock

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Where does “music” leave off and “sound art” begin?  There is already a lot of ink out there on this question, and I don’t plan to reinvent those wheels, many of which are perfectly round and roll just fine on their own. But one major difference that occurs to me is that music is expected to entertain; it’s a performing art. Many artists who work with sound occupy a grey zone between the “fine arts” – the ones that hold still or wait patiently in a museum for you to grant them a visit – and the “performing arts,” which try to make you hold still long enough for them to visit you. One of the running themes in this bi-weekly column will be studies of artists – whether they are called musicians or sound artists or whatever – who address the burden of entertainment. I’ll start with Max Neuhaus, the avant garde percussionist with a busy performance and recording career who one day decided to drop it all and start making quiet, nearly invisible installations that weave sound into architecture and public works. Neuhaus changed from a performing musician to an installation artist because he felt suffocated by “the onus of entertainment.” He wanted to make sounds that people could come to on their own, even accidentally. As an installation artist, Neuhaus could refuse to grab people, and not insist on their awareness; as a performer – especially as a famously shirtless percussionist (witness the cover of “Electronics & Percussion” on Sony Classical) – he felt he did not have that option.

The following is based on some thoughts I had after first experiencing Neuhaus’ Times Square sound installation in March 2009, one month after his death at 69. It also draws on the seminal collection Max Neuhaus Sound Works Vol. I-III published by Cantz Verlag.

In his essay from that collection, Carter Ratcliff claims that “music has no permanent relationship to space,” and the creation of musical space is a work of engineering, not music. One could extend Ratcliff’s statements to the supposed difference between composer and performer. Case in point, the Western classical music hierarchy (quickly and bluntly summarized): composing, which hardly makes a peep, is considered the highest musical activity; conducting, which is soundless, is the next step down, the right hand of the composer; performing, which makes almost all of the sound, is craftsmanship at best and labor at worst; and audio engineering, architecture, and acoustics – which really determine what people hear – are not considered musical activities at all. Neuhaus was well-suited to undermine this hierarchy by his previous role within it as a “modern classical music” insider.

Ratcliff again: “Whenever he [Neuhaus] accepts a museum as a site for an installation, he tries to remove some portion of the space from its privileged condition. Neuhaus at work in a museum is like a sceptic fixing up a portion of an abbey or a church as ordinary living quarters.” Neuhaus avoids the precious, and avoids drawing attention to himself. In his music, Neuhaus turned away from the privilege of the stage and the power it gave him. In his installations, he also undermines the site’s power.

The intersection of Neuhaus with self-idiomatic music is not in the refusal of music-ness in favor of art-ness, but in the return to awareness of the social, quotidian, and accidental dimensions of sounding places. More than Cagean awareness, it is taking the site as your instrument – and further still, taking yourself (ears, body, thoughts) as the instrument of the site.

The Neuhaus Times Square piece is a perfect example: there is no plaque. It was switched off for many years and then turned back on recently with little fanfare. It is like a noise or punk gig advertised through word of mouth, or not at all. Unannounced, unassuming, un-entertaining, nonetheless it changes the character of that little patch of Times Square in ways that make pedestrians stop and listen and think about sound in one of the noisiest, busiest places in the world. And they may not even realize they are hearing a work of art; they may even think this was their own private discovery, and in a way they are right. A completely normal moment, as if you are breathing or drinking water, but stopping in a crosswalk to do so.

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Mike Bullock is a composer, performer, visual artist, and writer living in Boston, MA. He is a member of The BSC (an improvising ensemble led by Bhob Rainey), the trio Mawja (with Mazen Kerbaj and Vic Rawlings) and in the sound & light duo rise set twilight (with Linda Aubry Bullock).

The variety of component positions occupied by sound in the experience and production of many works of art regardless of medium or intent need not be about sound directly, but might make or engage sound as a secondary concern or often, an unconsidered consequence.  From the silence demanded by the museum to the environmental immersion of earthworks and other site-specific interventions, sound (or its absence) often marks either the means of production or the condition of reception for works of art regardless of medium or intent. From the coded acoustics of the place of reception and the figuring of listening in representational practices to the evocation of the acoustic-imaginary in conceptual works and music as (or in the service of) art work, sound can be worked as material, developed as medium, and function as support.  By acknowledging that the experience of art can be a multimodal enterprise and tuning our critical tools in kind, a rich body of work becomes available that might expand the discursive field surrounding the artistic deployment of sound.

The myriad complexities introduced to criticism by attending to the role played by sound in art works has led to generalizations, formalizations, and philosophical declarations that have muffled the historical placement, the artistic intention, or the physical experience of the work itself. In an effort to champion sound within artistic practice, critics and theorists of sound have employed a largely historiographic methodology, searching for precedent in an effort to legitimate the emergence of what has come to be a fascinating, rhizomatic breadth of diverse practices.  By claiming the roots of a unified practice of sound in the work of the historical avant-gardes (futurism, dada, surrealism), the iconoclastic praxis of the composer John Cage, and (mis)readings of the philosophy and practices of musique concrete, any clear reading of how sound functions as a component within the work of art in general is problematically reduced to a positivist parentage in the place of an open genealogy. The study of works of art will only benefit from a developed understanding of the way in which sound might contribute to its initial conception and consequent reception. Likewise, a practitioner’s self-identification as a sound artist need not artificially limit the discussion of their work merely to its sound component.  Working against this medium-specific myopia, it is precisely the role of sound working as a component that encourages its being read in relationship to the entirety of the work.

The indexing of works into critical categories such as sound-art, sonic art, lydkunst, arte sonoro, and klangkunst has productively raised awareness and aided research, but it has also ghettoized practitioners and exposed a critical lacunae in the methodological tools available to the history and theory of art.  While searching for an originary moment for the emergence of a ‘sound art’ as a defined practice, historians may have stopped listening to the sounds that art has been making for decades from outside the scare quotes and hyphenated phrases of taxonomy.

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Seth Cluett (b. 1976, Troy, NY) is an artist, performer, and composer whose work ranges from photography, and drawing to video, sound installation, concert music, and critical writing.

“When each of us goes out on to the street we hear our culture. Our work asks the question: what type of offer are we making to our senses, and how does this effect our daily life?” – Sam Auinger

by DEREK HOFFEND

While walking in North Adams, MA, on Marshall Street under the Highway #2 overpass near the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, you may discover a low pitched hum arising around you, blending mysteriously with other ambient sounds of the bridge above. Pay even closer attention to tracking this sound, and your ears will lead you surprisingly to a concrete cube on the sidewalk. What you are experiencing is a project by Bruce Odland and Sam Auinger called Harmonic Bridge. Collectively called O+A, Odland and Auinger create site-specific sound-installations often tailored to public spaces and working explicitly with particular acoustic characteristics of each site.

The sound you are hearing from the cube is actually generated from the bridge above. Ambient noises from traffic traversing the bridge are filtered and tuned in real-time by two 16-foot tuning tubes installed along the bridge. Working with the phenomena of sympathetic resonance, these tubes are tuned to a specific note – in this case ‘C’. The tubes naturally amplify sound-waves that fit their length, and several overtones that are whole-number ratios of this length. The pitches are then picked up by microphones installed inside of the tubes, amplified, and transmitted to the two concrete cubes on the sidewalk (one on each side of the street). Think of blowing into a bottle to get a pitch, playing a didgeridoo, or holding a sea-shell to your ear and hearing the ‘sea’ (ambient noise filtered and amplified by the internal shape and volume of the shell), and you’ll have an idea of some familiar sounds formed by resonances occurring inside the volumes and shapes of other hollow objects.

Harmonic Bridge demonstrates a fascinating acoustic principle, but it is more than a technical exercise. The piece gives shape and structure to a sound-world otherwise often overlooked as simply chaos and noise, amplifying an underlying structure and bringing it to our awareness like looking at cells through a microscope. It transforms randomness into something we can sink our teeth into, something we can even hum to, and approach through more traditional musical terms. Tuning the noise through this filter turns the whole bridge into one gigantic instrument, played unknowingly by drivers and the oscillations created by their vehicles. Instead of attempting to tune out noise, O+A have accepted its inevitable presence in our world and are tuning into it instead, editing and refining it by exploiting what it gives us on its own terms and then extracting and amplifying specific details of its character.

Harmonic Bridge is unique in many ways within the art-world. In terms of sound-art, it is a rare example of a permanent sound-installation in the public-sphere. In public art, it is a welcome addition to a category mostly populated by more traditional visual media. It is also unique in that it is sponsored by an institution, in this case MassMoCA. O+A’s piece is actually one of four permanent and site-specific sound-art works in the museum’s collection. The museum deserves credit for recognizing the importance of this kind of work, helping to put sound art and site-specific installation on the map and demonstrating a rare commitment to this form.

The following questions were graciously answered by Bruce Odland and Sam Auinger regarding this project.

Derek Hoffend: What process did you go through while originally discovering or deciding that you could tune ambient noise to a specific pitch, specifically with bridge sounds?

Bruce Odland: In Rome in 1991 we discovered that we could used trapped air resonance from inside Roman Amphora that were vibrating to the sounds of traffic, and by miking the interior and putting that rarified resonance back on site in real time we could alter the emotional quality of the site using very little volume and power even though this playback occurred in the same polluted sound environment. This was an accidental discovery in that we routinely listen to everything around us, and happened to also drop a mic into the amphora. Since that time we have found a modern industrial analogy as a resonator, and that is industrial tubing of various sorts.
Since any length of tubing will produce sympathetic resonance according to its length and the speed of sound, we needed lots of listening time in different urban and non urban environments to determine which range of lengths provided the best transformations considering our goal- to render the sounds around harmonic according to human musical tastes so that we could ” hear the city as a symphony”. Tubes that were too short and activated by traffic mainly emphasized the tire noise, and kept hammering the fundamental length without producing much in terms of melodic interest. Tubes too long would bring the fundamental below the range of human hearing and bring the high harmonics above 24 where they really are too close together to hear as a musical scale to the foreground. It was a journey of discovery combining musical aesthetics and physics that led us to find our range of lengths and widths that fulfilled our compositional goals. In addition the position of the microphone within a given tube is of utmost importance since that proportional length within the waveform is the determining factor in the harmonic content of the wave. Slight shifts in mic position can cancel feedback, enhance certain overtone mixes, and alter the aesthetic readout.

DH: How do you decide which pitch to tune into? Is there a specific way that you like to analyze the environmental noise?

Sam Auinger: Each site is different and has its specific acoustical fingerprint. Our process is to carefully study each site to learn not only about its specific acoustical conditions (intelligibility, diffusion, resonance time, materials, ie, the acoustics of the negative space between the buildings in a city which is almost always unintentional) but also the social use of the site, its history, its daily and weekly noise pattern, its economy, its inhabitants etc. The length of the tuning tube we choose, and therefore the living overtone series generated by this length is a result of all these studies. The fundamental frequency we choose can have metaphorical reasons (such as tuning the three tubes at the Kitchen in NYC back in 1997 to the lowest three strings of Lou Reed’s guitar) or purely acoustical ones (such as staying in tune with strong existing harmonic sources – such as a ventilation fan that is already coloring the sound of the site, or a distance between buildings that is already building up a resonance in the site)..but the main goal is to change the site in a harmonically perceivable way. We mean to bring this harmonic shift in the site to an observable level for any pedestrian without foreknowledge to notice this change, to shift perceptions of the space based on this change, and to find the site generally more humane and livable because of our intervention.

DH: Can you describe how you choose the length and width of pipe you use to do the tuning, and how this might compare to other kinds of tuning pipes, for example, in other instruments?

SA: The choice of tubes length for “Blue Moon” at the WFC Plaza in 2004 was something called the “golden tuning”, the same as a cello is tuned in fifths. The idea was to find a musical analogy to the strong environmental differences you will find between low, mid and high tide and create a tuning that made the tidal action over time strongly perceivable.

DH: How are you getting the tuned sounds into the cubes on the ground?

SA: The mic, placed at a very special harmonic node inside the tube is cabled to a preamp, amp and then to the cube speakers. As in every site specific piece, these locations and methods are determined by what is locally available. The trick is always to make it last under conditions of weather and humanity.

DH: Is there a significance to the cube-shape for the speaker and chair – for example are there technical and/or aesthetic reasons for the shape and materials chosen?

BO: Back in 1990, O+A were making our first large scale outdoor installation, The Garden of Time Dreaming for the Castle of Linz, Austria and the 400th anniversary of Linz. The Museum Director asked us how we were going to avoid vandalism and theft, as recent losses to the Ars Electronica Festival nearby had been significant. We replied that our plan was to be more clever than thieves. Since this installation was celebrating the shift from alchemy to science at the time of Johannes Kepler, we focused on the cube shape featured in so many alchemical drawings. We designed a non-directional, non-phase speaker inside a block of heavy cement. We gave it human dimensions so that it could work as street furniture. We have used it ever since, especially enjoying the way it marks and couples with architectural outdoor space without beaminess. It became the perfect iconic tool to mark and protect our interventions.

DH: The growing field of acoustic-ecology and sound-mapping directs our attention to the sound-characters and identities of spaces, encouraging a sonic perspective and language within a world largely defined through a visual language. You also discuss a similar idea of decoding the soundscape through an ‘Alphabet of Sounds’ in your writings on the O+A website. Can you describe some similarities or differences in your perspective on this subject?

BO: In our work, O+A is not particularly interested in moral judgments about soundscapes.( nature =good vs. city sounds=bad). By now we live in a world where nature and machine sounds coexist whether we like it or not. It is our cultural sound. It is the sound produced mainly by accident by the economy and social structure we live in.

But by this point in the industrial soundscape our whole habit of listening is mainly formed to shut things out- to become active NOT LISTENERS. O+A then strive to transform this unintentional sound we all make into audible information that reveals aspects of the culture invisible to pure visual thinking. The key is for people to become active listeners again, to engage with the sounds around them, to think with their ears. When each of us goes out on to the street we hear our culture. Our work asks the question- what type of offer are we making to our senses and how does this effect our daily life?

DH: Can you describe how you see sound-art functioning in the public realm as compared to other kinds of public-art?

SA: We cannot speak in general about sound-art and it’s function…but “good sound-art” is definitely helping to change the way in which we perceive a site and how we think about the world we are living in including bringing up the question how our senses are working.

DH: Please describe your experience working with a museum to realize your project, and how it may compare/contrast to other avenues for exhibiting and producing your work (ie. smaller galleries, design clients, etc.).

SA: There is no standard experience with this sort of work, as each site specific project has its own story… the difference is in the way how you get your audience. In a festival or museum environment, the audience assumes that whatever they find is intended to be meaningful and worthy of discovery…this cannot be assumed in public space on the street. Since our work is mainly happening in public places, the audience is a mixture of people coming on purpose to get in touch with the piece and people finding the piece on their daily ways. Each piece has to contain its own context and cannot rely on the context provided by the museum. In fact this is appropriate because the context provided by the museum and the gallery are in some ways exactly the same, visual. But the support of an institution such as a museum can be very important in terms of creating long durations- long term pieces that decelerate the perception of the sound in the culture are a particular goal in works such as this.

DH: Where do you see sound-art laying in the spectrum of interest among museums these days, as well as its reception in the public sphere?

SA: Sometimes I have the feeling that sound-art earns more respect and attention but it is a feeling with no backup of hard numbers in budgets and numbers of exhibitions… one reason will be that it is hard to produce multiples to be workable on the art-market and second its main power timewise is by slowing everything down… it is not part of an accelerated “zeitgeist” …and it is most of the time site-specific and very hard to transform into other medias besides documentary or commentary fields.

DH: Would you say a few words about your upcoming work ‘Requiem for Fossil Fuels’ and your activities in NYC in November?

BO: It is particularly interesting to bring the Requiem for Fossil Fuels back to New York to perform it at the World Financial Center for several good reasons. It is the Age of Noise and New York is the center of that noise. Many of the sounds of the “orchestra of cities” that we accompany the singers with came out of the New York explorations that Sam and I did over the past years. This New York soundscape is at the hub of our current understanding of cities, sounds and society. We have been studying it, recording it, making installations in it for years now. Our installation Blue Moon was located on the plaza overlooking the harbour just outside the glass doors of the Winter Garden where the Requiem will be performed on Nov 12th. The whole Offertum section (see text below) was developed on top of the sounds of jets, and helicopters passing by the same site and resonating the tuning tubes. Embedded in that rather terrifying mix of jet fuel, power and skyscraper resonance are the vibrant human voices singing:

“Domine, Jesu Christe, Rex gloriae,
libera animas omniurn fidelium defunctorum
de poenis inferni, et de prof undo lacu:
libera cas de ore leonis,
ne absorbeat eas tartarus, ne cadant in obscurum,

Lord Jesus Christ, King of glory,
deliver the souls of all the faithful
departed from the pains of hell
and from the bottomless pit.
Deliver them from the lion’s mouth.
Neither let them fall into darkness
nor the black abyss swallow them up.”

The other resonance is cultural. Under the master builder Robert Moses, from the 30′s well into the 60′s, New York provided the model of modern transport to the rest of the world. We had the first superhighways, we put the car at the center of everything and short changed public transport to pay for bridges and highways that allowed us to see the river but not hear it, to see the parkways but not inhabit them. It was the formula for the accelerating visual industrial culture that swept the world. Now we have a chance to perform the Requiem for fossil fuels in the very heart of this world. Our message will be to stop and listen and hear what we have become.

* * * * *

Derek Hoffend (b. 1974) is a sculptor, audio artist, and performer who creates sound-sculpture installations and electro-acoustic music. Currently based in Boston, MA, he teaches as a full-time visiting-faculty member in the Sound-Area at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. A member of the Mobius Artist Group, he performs with the Mobius Quartet and the New England Phonographers Union.

*****

Discussing art that produces sound has tripped up some of the most brilliant people writing about art and aesthetics. With such a diversity of artistic practices contributing to this medium, I think a new tact is warranted to avoid the pitfalls of stodgy history and clever theory, while at the same time expanding the body of work to  be explored.  This column will try to develop a method of presentation to highlight this diversity and remain conscious of the independence and individuality of these works.

In each column, I will present a micro-history of the artistic use of sound and introduce some work that may be familiar, some work that is rarely discussed, and some whose extant discussion has been clouded by academic arguments or incomplete information.  I’ll  highlight an individual artist or work, a particularly fascinating historical moment, or the work of a curator whose approach may help unravel the knots of exhibiting auditory work.  More than anything, I offer readers raw material to construct a history from what I hope will prove a compelling series of artifacts. – Seth Cluett

JOYFUL DESTRUCTION

The Swiss-born sculptor Jean Tinguely (1925-1991) produced a prolific body of work that spins, rattles, shakes, and implodes. His motors, wheels, junkstore bits, and landfill pieces were an inspiration to artists such as Robert Rauchenberg; his self-destructing work Homage á New York (1960) that destroyed itself in the courtyard of the Museum of Modern Art was among the most progressive work of its time. Often relegated to the genre of ‘Kinetic Art,’ it is possible to trace a life-long engagement with sound, technology, chaos, and indeterminism through his work. More than mere kineticism, these issues expose an engagement with the rapid development and acceptance of technology in the society in which he was working, the destructive side of human nature being assessed in the decades following World War II, and an earnest questioning of the relationship between the spectator and the work of art.

Tinguely’s contribution to the common narrative of sound in art practice has been limited to the production of two sound-specific works in the late fifties. These works, Relief Meta-Mechanique Sonore (1955) and Mes Etoiles – Concert pour Sept Peintres (1958), though their titles evoke sound, are in truth the last in a series of pieces in which sound functioned as a component within a broader base of material and aesthetic concern. Tingely’s engagement with sound began in his teens in the mid-1930s, emerged artistically with the start of his practice in the fifties, and remained a fascination throughout his life. While looking – as well as listening – to his considerable output, it is clear that sound, while not always central, was a deeply important facet of a complete sensory experience of his oeuvre.

In the 1960s, Tinguely began to disassemble technology in two different series of works, radio sculptures and radio drawings. In 1962 alone he produced ten floor standing radio sculptures and 14 wall-mounted radio drawings. These pieces were deconstructions of transistor radios that employed the wires, knobs, speaker, and antennae as the material and a hidden motor and gear assembly that was able to turn the radio volume and tuner. They were exhibited widely in the early sixties through Europe, in New York, and in 1963 at the Minami Gallery in Tokyo. (The exhibition at Minami was attended by Takehisa Kosugi, Toshi Ichiyanagi, and Yasunao Tone – a 7” Record was produced.)

Throughout his life, Tinguely explored the sounds of explosions, as in Homage à New York (1960) and The End of the World (1962); the sound of water, as in The Stravinsky Fountain (1982-83 in collaboration with Niki de Saint-Phalle); and sounds that interrogate music, such as Meta-Harmonie II (1979):

In any given piece, sound might function as the byproduct of moving parts, a sonification of indeterminancy worked out through spinning wheels, or a hidden noise that pours forth via unseen devices buried in the mechanics of gears. But whether the sound of these works was intended or not, the questioning of this intention is both imperative and compelling. Tinguely’s work is at once an art of destruction and child-like simplicity, a critique and a celebration of technology, an exploration of the detritus of our consumption, and well worth our listening.

*****

Seth Cluett (b. 1976, Troy, NY) is an artist, performer, and composer whose work ranges from photography, and drawing to video, sound installation, concert music, and critical writing. His column “Micro-Histories of Sonic Art” appears monthly at Intransitive Recordings.com