Art of Sound

Saibal Ray
Centre for Sound Design

Audio Art or sound art is a new genre of contemporary art that uses various technological sounds, natural ambience and sounds of our day to day life to create a piece of art. This is an interdisciplinary art form that includes and resorts to many genres of traditional art forms and subjects, like music, acoustic ecology, acousmatic sound (acousmatic sound is a sound that one hears without seeing the originating cause), psychoacoustics as well as painting. The painting, which is inspired by the sound, is also being called sound art nowadays. For example, ‘Frozen’ (5 Days Off MEDIA: Frozen, Wed 2 through Sat 26 July 2008, Melkweg Mediaroom & Paradiso, Amsterdam) was an exhibition that held in Amsterdam in July of 2008 to present sound as a space. [1] As this exhibition was described, “In the Mediaroom at the Melkweg multi-channel sound pieces can be experienced over an advanced speaker setup, accompanied by sound in a "frozen" form: Images and sculptural objects made using sound as input. These artworks use audio analysis and custom software processes to extract meaningful data from the sound signal, creating a mapping between audio and other media. Frozen will feature digital prints as well as four "sound sculptures" created using digital fabrication technology such as rapid prototyping, CNC and laser cutting, which allow for the direct translation of a digital model into physical form.” [2] This example clearly shows a new emerging art form, which is quite different from the traditional art forms, though the main focus, in this exhibition, was definitely on the visual representation of sound. To be very clear here sound was used as a brush to paint a soundscape, which is a sort of abstract landscape. And the end result of the exhibition was without any doubt beyond expectation. To have an overview and realize the impact of this exhibition, the websites given in the footnote could be referred to.

This new domain of sound art is not only isolated within the periphery of physical or ‘frozen’ representation of sound, it has already brought forth many more sub-genres, based on our day to day life, of contemporary art. For instance, there are sonification, soundscape, sound installation, sound sculpture, sound poetry, radio art, noise music, electronic music and many more.

Sonification is described as the use of non-speech audio to convey information in our daily life.[3] For example sms alert, ring tone of our cell phone. This is also known as ‘Audio display’, which is very often necessary to have constant awareness of some vital body functions, especially, for example, in operation theatre. Since every science has an art of invention and application embedded, the scientific technique of sonification is also naturally being used in traditional art forms, like cinema and music. But the main problem is most of the time the usage of sonification appears to be boring and monotonous because of lack of research and exhibitions that can motivate the traditional as well as contemporary artists to incorporate this technique of sonification more creatively understanding the psychological and social impact of sonification in an updated sense.

       

Soundscape is another domain that has immense raw material to inspire sound art in various directions. But unfortunately, it has long been ignored in India for some unknown reason. The study of soundscape is a subject of acoustic ecology, which defines a space by its sound. Like the normal history of human society, there is also a history of soundscape. Earlier the world was dominated by the natural sounds of babbling water, rustling leaves, chirp of birds, wind etc. Slowly the soundscapes started to get replaced with the human made sounds or noises. The pure natural soundscape of different places was slowly invaded by the human noise. For example, with the development of agriculture and dependence on the modern technology, the sound of an electrical motorized pump has become so prevalent in Indian villages that it could easily be used in a cinema to give a hint of villagescape. In the same way the Indian cities are dominated by the sound of ‘auto-rickshaws’ i.e three wheeler mass transport vehicles. Besides, now from village to city the whole soundscape is becoming uniform because of random urbanization in the countries of ‘third world’. Whether the diversity is good or bad, is certainly a matter of debate. But the reality is that it is changing. And naturally there will be an urge in the mind of sound artists to capture the aural history and display it to the audience. Not only for this urge but also to save this environment from noise pollution the study of soundscape or acoustic ecology is extremely important. To get the attention of the people to the sonic environment, an educational and research group called WSP (World Sound Project) was established by R. Murray Schafer at Simon Fraser University during the late 1960s and early 1970s.[4] This group studied sonic environment of various places and published them. One of the important publications of this group is ‘The Vancouver Soundscape’. The influence of this later helped to form ‘World Forum for Acoustic Ecology’[5] which worked on to connect all the scholars and people who are concerned with the sonic environment of this world. At the same time this group published soundscape compositions and served City of Vancouver’s Urban Noise Task Force and contributed to the educational recommendations of its final report ‘Urban Noise’.[6] From the activity of WSP it is clearly visible how a study on the sonic environment can be helpful to human society and to the arena of art. The soundscape compositions reveal a new and larger context of sound art, of which music is only a part.

Sound installation is an extension of the traditional art installation form. The sound installation incorporates sound element in a space that is installed to be experienced in a different way. The main difference between traditional installation art and sound installation art is that the later includes the temporal element, since sound requires time to be perceived. So, sound installation demands time from the audience. The advantage of sound installation is it engages audience within the space. At the same time this art is site-specific, which means it involves the space within its periphery. So if the installation is removed from the space, it looses its value or charm. In a sound installation musicians or performer could perform or produce the sound. At the same time it could be designed with sound sources (e.g. speakers) placed in different space points. Precisely sound installation is a time based art form that incorporates installation art, sound art and sound sculpture. Many of the contemporary artists and scholars have already experimented with this art form.[7] In India there are few academic institutions (e.g. SRFTI)1 and private organizations that practice and pioneer serious installation and soundscape designing, though it is essential to create more such institutions for academic practice.

Sound sculpture is another popular term regarding sound art, which is again a time based intermedia art form. Sound sculpture is any kind of art object, which is produced by the manipulation of sound or vice versa. This form could be site-specific or not. Cymatics (Study of wave phenomena) and Kinetic art (the art inspired by the study of movement or movement itself) mostly influenced this art form. The exhibition ‘Frozen’, which has been mentioned in the beginning of this essay, had a few sound sculptures installed. For details refer to the footnotes.

Sound poetry is supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.  Sound poetry, interestingly is not at all a contemporary phenomenon. In the 20th century the Futurist and the Dadaist vanguards were the first to introduce a form of a poetry that emphasizes on the phonetic aspect of human speech rather on the semantic and the syntactical aspects. So, sound poetry was precisely defined as ‘verse without words’. This type of poetry has actually found a proper place in the performing art i.e. these are to be performed. So, this could also be seen as an effort to use the human voice as a sound-generating instrument. This form of poetry is said to have influenced the ‘concrete music movement’, which was mainly focused on electro-acoustics music, of late 1940s.[8]

Radio art is one of the most popular sound arts. It is an art that is produced by using the sound in such a way that it could be transmittable. Though any form of audio art can be transmitted out through radio, the contemporary popular radio art is highly dominated by human speech and thus songs.

Besides, the abstract energy of sound can be manipulated in many other ways to produce different genres of audio art. For example noise music[9], electronic music, NIME (New Interfaces for Musical Expression)[10], text sound art and intermedia arts, like cinema, that incorporates sound art as well as the art forms, like installation and sculpture that force (read influence) the sound art to break through into the their periphery.

Unfortunately the art of audio is not at all properly recognized in India. The proper research and academic practice in this field could easily explore a new arena of art as well as recognize the sound artists , who are working silently across the country as mere sound recording and mixing engineer, or sound designer mostly for film and television. At the same time this exploration of sound art can lead us to build up a soothing sonic environment that is essentially required in the context of rapid urbanization of Indian villages to keep the development for a more comfortable lifestyle up without creating a detrimental sonic environment around.

Useful Links

[1] http://www.neublack.com/art-design/frozen-sound-art-exhibition/ (30/10/2008, 14:16),

http://www.designboom.com/weblog/cat/10/view/3293/frozen-sound-art-exhibition.html (30/10/2008, 14:16).

[2] http://www.flickr.com/photos/watz/sets/72157605938577977/, (30/10/2008, 14:16),

[3] http://www.icad.org/websiteV2.0/References/nsf.html (30/10/2008, 15:18)

[4] http://www.sfu.ca/~truax/wsp.html (30/10/2008 19:20)

[5] http://interact.uoregon.edu/MediaLit/WFAE/home/ (30/10/2008 19:53)

[6] http://vancouver.ca/ctyclerk/cclerk/970513/citynoisereport/ (30/10/2008 19:47)

[7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurie_Anderson (30/10/2008 20:28)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liz_Phillips (30/10/2008 20:28)

[8] http://www.ears.dmu.ac.uk/spip.php?rubrique143 (30/10/2008 21:30)

[9] http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=314 (30/10/2008 22:29)

[10] http://www.nime.org/ (30/10/2008 22:23)

*****

With a postgraduate diploma in film and television from SRFTII in Kolkata, Saibal Ray happens to be a Dolby Scholarship Holder. Having published three fictions, Saibal has worked with prestigious organizations such as SRFTII, Linear Electronics, Acoustics and Audio Video Solutions Pvt. Ltd., Ramoji Academy of Film and Television and Amity University. He was also a fellow member of Asian Film Academy in Busan in South Korea.