Introduction to Sound Arts

Book Report on The Fundamentals of Sonic Arts & Sound Design

“There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time.There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.”

                                                                                   —John Cage, “Silence”

This book introduces a subject that  sonic arts is one of the new art forms. The application of sound to other mix medias such as film or video is well known and the idea of sound as a medium in its own right such as radio is also widely accepted. However, sound stands up for itself It can no longer be relegated to a subordinate role.

Tony Gibbs, leader of the BA Sonic Arts programme at Middlesex University stated that Sonic art covers a huge range of creative activities, many of which have absolutely nothing to do with music save that, like music, the audience experiences the finished work by hearing it. In some respects it would be perfectly reasonable for our difficult child to round upon its parent (music) and to reverse the argument: all music is sonic art but (as we shall see later) not all sonic art is music! 

He introduces, describes and begins the process of defining this new subject and to provide a starting point for anyone who has an interest in the creative uses of sound. The book explores the worlds of sonic arts and sound design through their history and development, and looks at the present state of these extraordinarily diverse genres through the works and words of established artists and through an examination of the wide range of practices that currently come under the heading of sonic arts. One of the most exciting things about sonic art is the huge size and diversity of the family: from fine art to performance, from film to interactive installations, from poetry to sculpture and, of course, not forgetting music, all these can be part of the multicultural society that is sonic art. 

This book is exactly what i needed: a kind of “Sonic Art for Dummies.” It is well written, easy to digest with cool pictures, very clearly structured, and it provides me with some useful tools that will help me keep an eye on the sonic installations and how sound cooperate with body movements in my future art works.

We differ the 4 chapters into two groups; I will show my perspectives on the origins and developments & Artists and their Work. While Haifa would work on the part on Process and practice dealt with organizations and realization and presentation in sound art. 

The first part explores the origins and developments of the genre with a nice timeline and a focus on pioneers such as Edgard Varese, Steve Reich and John Cage. The technology merely provides the tools with which to create the art while, for others, it suggests new possibilities and even provides the fundamental inspiration that drives and informs the entire creative process. The evolution of sonic art as a distinct form has been very closely linked to the development of audio technologies and in the following section, we will begin to explore this evolving relationship. 

This is the time line from the early ages to 1933. I will select the relative significant information from here. Early instruments seem to have been based upon natural objects such as conch shells and hollow bones. By the first century BC these, were well-established parts of theatre design by architects such as Marcus Vitruvius Pollo. According to Bruce Smith ‘…a Vitruvian theatre could be played by actors as if it were a musical instrument.’What we see here is the first clear evidence of deliberate sound design in
the theatre. 

Serious sound design and, subsequently, sonic art had to await the advent of recording and, more particularly, of electronics following the First World War. The recording process itself is widely acknowledged to have been invented in 1877 by Thomas Edison. 

Francis Bacon was one of the leading figures in natural philosophy and in the field of scientific methodology in the period of transition from the Renaissance to the early modern era. He describes facilities that not only
resemble a modern recording studio but also anticipate the type of work:

We have also soundhouses, where we practise and demonstrate all sounds and their generation. We have harmony which you have not of quarter sounds and lesser slides of sounds. Divers instruments of music likewise to you unknown, some sweeter than any you have; with bells and rings that are dainty and sweet. We represent small sounds as great and deep, likewise great sounds extenuate and sharp; we make divers tremblings and warblings of sounds, which in their original are entire. We represent and imitate all articulate sounds and letters, and the voices and notes of beasts and birds. The best part of the chapter presents the work of Italian futurist Luigi Russolo and in particular his 1913 treatise The Art of Noises that puts forward an idea revolutionary for the time: there should be no barriers between sounds that have musical or instrumental origins and those who come from the street, the industry or even warfare. 

He stated:“NOISE, HOWEVER, REACHING US IN A CONFUSED AND IRREGULAR WAY FROM THE IRREGULAR CONFUSION OF OUR LIFE, NEVER ENTIRELY REVEALS ITSELF TO US, AND KEEPS INNUMERABLE SURPRISES IN RESERVE. WE ARE THEREFORE CERTAIN THAT BY SELECTING, COORDINATING AND DOMINATING ALL NOISES WE WILL ENRICH MEN WITH A NEW AND UNEXPECTED SENSUAL PLEASURE .”

He tried to prove his point with his Intonarumori (or Noise Intoners) machines. Each of them produced a particular type of noise, there was the Ululator (the howler), the Crepitatori (the crackers), and the Stropicciatore (the rubber). On April 24, 1914, he conducted the first ‘Gran Concerto Futuristica’ with musicians playing those noise machines. The audience responded by throwing vegetables, booing, hooting and whistling. Getting knowledges from here, sonic art is the idea of using nonmusical sounds in art has begun to be established.

The tape recorder, remained the primary resource for creative activities in sound, which made its public debut at the Berlin Radio Fair in 1935.

Schaeffer used disk recorders and players in his work – a clear precursor of the modern experimental DJ techniques. He went on to work with tape recorders, including specially built machines such as the ‘Phonogene’, which allowed tape recordings to be played using a keyboard. This was one of the several ancestors of the modern sampler and, for the first time, allowed non-musical sound sources to be treated in the same way as conventional instruments. Interestingly, Schaeffer called his work ‘Musique Concrète’ meaning that the ‘music’ was to be derived from ‘concrete’ (i.e. real) sources rather than ‘Musique Abstraite’ which was his term for the conventional process of composition followed by performance and (possibly) recording. One notable example was the work created by French composer Edgard Varèse for the 1958 Brussels Expo. His Poeme Électronique was, in many respects, something that we would regard nowadays as an installation work or indeed a work of sonic art rather than a piece of music. It used up to 425 loudspeakers distributed around the Le Corbusier-designed Phillips Pavilion and also included film and slide projections and lighting effects. The sounds were both concrete and electronic in origin and were processed using a range of techniques and he projected his music into space.

Steve Reich is normally regarded as a composer who specialises in the musical form known as ‘minimalism’. This relies, in part, on repetition and is now a well- established style. Some of Reich’s early works, however, are clearly not music in the conventional sense. His tape pieces Come Out (1966) and It’s Gonna Rain (1965) use the spoken word exclusively. They are also entirely dependent upon a technical process: the slightly out-of-sync repeating of two similar tape loops and their interaction. 

 Brian Eno stated“AMBIENT MUSIC” MUST BE ABLE TO ACCOMMODATE MANY LEVELS OF LISTENING ATTENTION WITHOUT ENFORCING ONE IN PARTICULAR; IT MUST BE AS IGNORABLE AS IT IS INTERESTING.’ In his early works of Mambient music, Brian Eno put forward the idea that music could assume an environmental role, becoming, as it were, part of the furniture and decor if not of the architecture itself.

Trevor Wishart is an English composer, based in York. Wishart has contributed to composing with digital audio media, both fixed and interactive. He has also written extensively on the topic of what he terms “sonic art”, and contributed to the design and implementation of software tools used in the creation of digital music; notably, the Composers Desktop Project.

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