The Routledge Companion to Sounding Art

Marcel Cobussen, Vincent Meelberg, Barry Truax, Marcel Cobussen, Vincent Meelberg, Barry Truax

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317672760
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

The Routledge Companion to Sounding Art presents an overview of the issues, methods, and approaches crucial for the study of sound in artistic practice. Thirty-six essays cover a variety of interdisciplinary approaches to studying sounding art from the fields of musicology, cultural studies, sound design, auditory culture, art history, and philosophy. The companion website hosts sound examples and links to further resources.

The collection is organized around six main themes:

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• Sounding Art: The notion of sounding art, its relation to sound studies, and its evolution and possibilities.

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• Acoustic Knowledge and Communication: How we approach, study, and analyze sound and the challenges of writing about sound.

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• Listening and Memory: Listening from different perspectives, from the psychology of listening to embodied and technologically mediated listening.

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• Acoustic Spaces, Identities and Communities: How humans arrange their sonic environments, how this relates to sonic identity, how music contributes to our environment, and the ethical and political implications of sound.

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• Sonic Histories: How studying sounding art can contribute methodologically and epistemologically to historiography.

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• Sound Technologies and Media: The impact of sonic technologies on contemporary culture, electroacoustic innovation, and how the way we make and access music has changed.

With contributions from leading scholars and cutting-edge researchers, The Routledge Companion to Sounding Art is an essential resource for anyone studying the intersection of sound and art.

Part 1

Sounding Art

Introduction

Marcel Cobussen

It is a Tuesday afternoon in November, approaching half past four, in a quiet neighborhood near the center of one of the largest cities in The Netherlands. Booting up my PC creates a cozy buzzing, rather like a log fire. The laughing and screaming of kids—schools are just out—is for a moment drowned out by the sounds of a garbage can, brought inside by one of the neighbors. A car passes by, and in the distance I hear the squeaking of train wheels. I begin listening to some of the sound examples the contributors to this Companion have addressed. I listen without headphones and at a rather modest volume so that the musical sounds inadvertently blend with the ambient sounds; the border between them fades—physiologically, as my hearing can no longer distinguish which sound comes from the loudspeakers and which one doesn’t, but also culturally: because each sound can in principle become music, the borders between the intra- and extra-musical can no longer be determined by comparing the objective characteristics of the sounds. I ask myself whether the sonification sounds that are playing now are sounding art. And what about the sounds coming from the rest of my environment: the kids, the cars, the trains, the computer, etc.? Do they become art when I listen to them as if they were music? And what if they are heard together, the environmental and recorded sounds, together forming a (sometimes) interesting soundscape, albeit not one to which I often pay a lot of attention? And do these questions really matter? How important or relevant is it to call these sounds art, sounding art?

Somehow it seems inevitable and indispensable to demarcate a relatively new concept, domain, or discipline, albeit temporarily, incompletely, unsatisfactorily, and even inelegantly. In order to create a space for something new—sound(ing) art, for example—markers need to be placed, identities constructed, distinctions created, differences and similarities named, histories (re)written, etc. This is what Derrida calls the strategy of in- and exclusion that works both diachronically and synchronically: outside and inside must be clearly captured by creating an unambiguous opposition between them. However, as Derrida (1987) makes brilliantly clear in his text “Parergon” (see also Kim-Cohen’s contribution in this part), this is not an easy task: the outside easily enters or becomes part of the inside, and, conversely, the inside needs the outside to constitute itself as inside. A frame—e.g., a frame around something we could call “sounding art”—is not only porous, so that the outside can never be kept completely outside, it also has its own “thickness” or “undecidability”—the frame as a grey zone or space between in which the differences between in- and outside fade. What belongs to the inside and to the outside is always arbitrary, dependent on decisions that cannot always be rationally or logically justified.

What is, presumably, excluded when using the concept “sounding art”? The visual? The tactile? Although it might be self-evident that sounding art accentuates the sonorous in and of an artwork (even when this component is inaudible), many authors in this Companion explicitly mention the visual aspects of that art form, which are sometimes even more prominent than the sonic ones. John Wynne’s contribution in part 2, for example, almost only addresses certain pictures incorporated in his multi-media installation Anspyaxw, even though the artwork is about an endangered indigenous (spoken) language, thus clearly sonic.

References to the tactile, too, are often close-at-hand. In “Edison’s Teeth: Touching Hearing,” Steven Connor maintains that how something sounds depends on what touches or comes into contact with it in order to generate the sound; we can never hear the sound of one thing alone (Connor in Erlmann 2004: 157). Sound and touch also meet when we form words with and in our mouth. We can even feel and hear sounds through our teeth, as they are perfectly able to receive and amplify vibrations (Connor in Erlmann 2004: 169). In part 2, David Howes quotes Robert Kauffman who states that in African cultures mouth bows are mainly valued for the ways in which they engage the sense of touch, as their sounds are often barely audible. Also in soundwalks, to which several contributors to this Companion refer, the tactile and the audible meet: the moving body not only produces its own sounds, tactile experiences influence how sounds are perceived. Conversely, what is heard to a certain extent dictates the route of the soundwalker.

So, what seems to be excluded in this concept of “sounding art” often turns out to be included in it: the other senses. In The Audible Past from 2003 Jonathan Sterne confirms this by stating that there is “no scientific basis for asserting that the use of one sense atrophies another” (Sterne 2003: 16). Human perception is always synesthetic, all senses influencing each other; there is no such thing as pure vision or pure hearing. In much the same way Veit Erlmann in Hearing Cultures from 2004 suggests to “conceive of the senses as an integrated and flexible network,” instead of claiming a (new) monopoly of the ear (Erlmann 2004: 4). In this Companion it is David Howes who explicitly addresses the intersensorial and synesthetic character of sounding art.

Following the problem of exclusion, let’s turn to inclusion: what could or should be included in this term “sounding art”? Here we will touch upon the borders of the second word, the word “art.” For example, is popular music a subcategory of sounding art, or does the word “art” prevent a number of pieces from this genre from being included? On which grounds can we make a distinction between “art music” and “non-art music,” if we would wish to do so at all? What about sounds which are not intended to be art per se, such as field recordings that are not (yet) processed, or various types of sonification, such as those described by Andrea Polli and Paul Vickers in this Companion, for example? Do they already belong to sounding art or not yet, awaiting the moment of incorporation into an artwork? Do we still need someone like John Cage to elevate everyday sounds to art, or has this elevation become a completely arbitrary symbolic act? Are the sounds of birds, whales, and insects already sounding art, or do we need David Rothenberg’s dialogical improvisations to include them in this category? Furthermore, sounding art seems to abolish the assumed opposition between sound art and music, making it irrelevant and outdated. However, does this dispense of the need for refined distinctions, stable strategies of in- and exclusion, in order to be better equipped to communicate knowledge, even while drawing borders seems such an impossible task?

All these considerations and questions can be distilled into this one: to be able to listen to, or experience sounding art, do we need to know what it is? One thing is sure: whether listening to music by J.S. Bach or Biosphere, whether experiencing sound art by Bernhard Leitner or Francisco Lopez, whether being sonically immersed in game sounds or the overwhelming noise of Sunn O))), I somehow know that certain sounds do not belong to these works; the very same sounds might be intrinsic elements of other sounding artworks, they might even interact interestingly to the sounds selected by the artists, but they are excluded from these particular works. I need this knowledge—(in)formed by conventions, listening experiences, reading about sounding art, etc.—to be able to concentrate on the sounding art sounds. Ears and mind are always already acting as filters; they make separations. New ideas, new proposals, new theories can put certain (obsolete) conventions and frames to the test, but never remove them altogether. That is not only the message of the General Introduction but also the main message of the first two essays of this Companion, by Leigh Landy and Laura Maes/Marc Leman. Their contributions, however, should not be read so much as an attempt to hermetically seal external borders, but rather as an invitation to reflect on judgments concerning sonic identities and how they come into existence in and through discourses as well as in concrete artworks.

Leigh Landy’s term “sound-based music” is coined to expand the domain of music, an emancipatory move to get music lovers interested in works of art that have sound as their most prominent ingredient but which are not usually considered music. It is, however, a win-win situation as it simultaneously liberates music from certain institutional and discursive constraints.

The distinction Landy makes between sound-based music and note-based music as well as his aim to stand up for an art form that has remained in the margins for quite some time resonates in Maes and Leman’s contribution. Their essay is meant to carve out a space for sound art, a space somewhere between, on the one hand, “composition” (reflecting our current understanding of the concept of music) and, on the other hand, art that has sound as only an accidental feature. As they write, a proper definition may give it “more recognition and respect as an art form in its own right.” Implicitly arguing against the term “sounding art” which might pass over the creation of a clearer identity of sound art, Maes and Leman have formulated criteria to secure an autonomous place for this art form.

Previously I have discussed the strategy of in- and exclusion mainly on the basis of intrinsic qualities: sound versus sight/tactility and art sounds versus non-art sounds. But the question “do we need to know what sounding art is in order to be able to listen to it?” as well as the chapters by Landy and Maes/Leman also demand us to take into account the discourses which surround music, sound-based art, and/or sounding art. Strategies of in- and exclusion, establishing identities, and the creation of categories and classification schemes—strategies which have strong political, social, ethical, religious, and/or economic dimensions—are often a discursive matter, a matter of language, of conceptualizations, of grammatology and syntax, of (re)writing, of (re)formulating. Discursive practices are among the most powerful tools humans have to structure, de-structure, and restructure the world. In other words, to hear certain sounds as music, sound art, or sounding art, we not only need our ears, but also a conceptual framework which makes it possible to identify sounds as such: no sounding art without the concept of “sounding art” even though this concept will always remain provisional, tentative, unstable, inconclusive, dynamic, arbitrary, open for adaptations and imputations. (This is, by the way, applicable to all concepts.)

In order to avoid the traps of essentialism it is necessary to move away from a mere formalism, from naturalism, from “the sounds themselves.” Establishing distinctions between, for example, music and sound art, is a semantic act affected by rhetorics and politics, an interaction of sounds with a symbolic grid. This move away from (sounding) elements that conventionally establish the ergon, the work “itself,” towards the (discursive) parergon, that which is outside of or next to the work, is what Douglas Kahn in this part describes as “sounds-in-themselves which will always be beside themselves” or what Seth Kim-Cohen in In the Blink of an Ear terms “sound-out-of-itself,” after having complained that “sonic theory insists on pursuing the essentialist, phenomenological route already tested and largely rejected by art-historical accounts of minimalism” (Kim-Cohen 2009: 92). The contributions of both Kahn and Kim-Cohen are not meant, in the words of Kim-Cohen, to deal with a “focus on materiality as the central issue but [with] the very notion of a central issue” (Kim-Cohen 2009: 259).

After having made a case for a methodological heterogeneity and heterodoxy concerning the study of sound(ing) art—i.e., an implicit reproach to a narrow formalism—Douglas Kahn lends force to this plea by formulating a critique on John Cage’s exposure to “sounds-in-and-of-themselves” in the anechoic chamber: in order to be able to hear these sounds, Cage needed another sound, the sound in his head telling him that such a thing as “sound-in-and-of-itself” actually exists. In order to make his claim, Cage needed the (inner and parergonal) voice of discursivity and conceptualization (cf. Kahn 2001: 190).

According to Kim-Cohen, questioning “sounds-in-themselves” also implies questioning the concept of a work, the sounding work (ergon) regarded as an autonomous, self-identical object. Besides discourses, other parergonal forces are co-determining our experience of what we habitually call “the work”: past experiences, future expectations, adjacent sounds, other works, institutional settings, curatorial framing, etc. Without these forces, a work can never become a work. However, these same forces not only construct but simultaneously de(con)struct the autonomy of the work.

If we take these claims by Kahn and Kim-Cohen seriously, the question of how to talk or to write about/with/to/around sounding art becomes pertinent and urgent. “No new world without a new language,” intones one of the characters of Ingeborg Bachmann’s The Thirtieth Year (1995). If discourse matters, if it codetermines a work and if it deconstructs the concept of a work at the same time, what kind of language is needed to interact with or to encounter sound, sound art, sounding art “works”? Can we treat sounds and sounding artworks in much the same way as we discuss, for example, visual arts? Can we use the same words, the same concepts, the same metaphors, the same theories? How can we reconcile the ostensibly opposite objectives to create conceptual clarity, to found (and find) an independent, proper space for sound(ing) art and, at the same time, to undermine and ignore this clarity by deconstructing seemingly stable concepts such as “sound” and “work”? What language, what sonic fiction, is needed to respect the sonic as sonic, to engage sound ethically, to approach sound(ing) art in its otherness without encasing it in the order of the same as Emmanuel Levinas would say?

“What would it mean to think sonically rather than merely to think about sound?” asks Christoph Cox in his essay “Sonic Philosophy” from 2013. Being intangible and evanescent, but nonetheless powerfully physical, sound lends credence to an ontology and materialism that diverges fundamentally from most current philosophies and cultural theories. Starting from sound means, according to Cox, to exchange the ontology of “objects,” “beings” and “solid matter” for a “sonic materialism” that privileges a thinking in events and becomings. Sounds are neither static nor qualities of objects or subjects; instead they are temporal and durational, tied to the qualities they exhibit over time: “bodies are dissolved into flows, objects are the residues of events, and effects are unmoored from their causes to float independently as virtual powers and capacities” (Cox 2013).

Thinking differentiality and flux implies giving priority to the verb instead of the noun, and that is exactly what Salomé Voegelin proposes in her contribution, thereby expressing the contingent and evolving complexity of the sonic event rather than recognizing its form or purpose.

In search of a language that grasps the material of sound rather than its source, in search of a “sonic grammar,” Voegelin derives inspiration from and joins in with Kodwo Eshun’s afro-futuristic neologism...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• General Introduction
• Part 1 Sounding Art
• Part 2 Acoustic Knowledge and Communication
• Part 3 Listening and Memory
• Part 4 Acoustic Spaces, Identities, and Communities
• Part 5 Sonic Histories
• Part 6 Sound Technologies and Media
• Name Index
• Subject Index