Locating creative sound

Locating creative sound.....

The roots of sound art can be traced to the early decades of the last century, when new sounds and mechanical devices radically expanded possibilities in the visual arts and music. This radical expansion seems to have been facilitated by certain key technological advances at the turn of the 20th century which provided both the fundamental tools of sound art (such as the radio and phonograph) and the modern concept of noise, which arose in tandem with the machine age.

Sound art has since emerged as a new media art which challenges the defined categories of sound /art /visual art /music /science /engineering. Creative experiments with sound play on the fringes of our often-unconscious aural experience in spaces at a time when the mainstream engagement is moving increasingly towards the visual. These are not strictly music, or noise, or speech, or any sound found in nature, but often includes, combines, and transforms elements of all of these. Common creative techniques include collage and cut-up, repetition, spatial manipulation, and electronic generation and signal processing.

However, sound art and sound culture, while emerging as a new media art has also become appropriated by mainstream gallery and critical practices. Increasingly sound art ends up in the heavily culturally coded environment of the art gallery or increasingly finds that it needs to be tied to an object (so that it can be visually documented, given a monetary value, given a value of authenticity and singularity, etc.), thereby, (yet again) being enslaved to the regime of the visual. While it is not true that all sound art pieces are dominated by the visual - the pieces which attain the position of highest importance in the hierarchy usually have a strong visual presence. Disembodied works, on the other hand, existing only as sound on tape or CD in the same contex are often marginalized.

In a post-Cagean world, if sound art is performed in front of an audience it can too easily be perceived as music or theater. If sound art happens on radio it becomes radiphonics or, again, music (?). But even that is not enough, sound theory which had begun its journey as an a cross disciplinary area encompassing branches of musicology, acoustic science, linguistics, cultural studies, philosophy, film theory, anthropology and history, often trying to bridge the gaps between these disciplines has now shown tendencies towards a reduction of its scope, moving towards a perceived purity or essential idea in an attempt to define itself in stricter terms. These directions threaten to be not only limiting but dangerous.

Rahul Bhattacharya