Introduction to Sound Arts

What is Sound Art? Where does it happen? Who produces it? Who consumes it? How? Where? Why? How does it relate to other forms of listening and sound-making?

Jessica Ellis stated: ‘Sound art is a contemporary art form that focuses on aural stimulation. Instead of interesting the eyes, like traditional painting, sound art uses music, produced sounds, and sound technology to create an artistic experience in listening and hearing. This relatively new art form has gained a passionate following as it reaches out to the art world in a new and distinct way.’

From my perspective, sound-art is all-embracing and forms an abstract style in most of the production. It is anything appearing from our daily life, contains memory and emotion. It is what we thought of art in a focal sense. It includes music snd artistic sounds. What’s more, it stirs our biological roots, might be passing along values in drama, advertisements, movies for specific commercial purpose. It is also regarded as a signal of the development of the Times. Just like futurists were celebrating the mechanical age and noises in Italy in the 20 century.

On another hand, the feeling gained from listening was also incredible and independent from everybody because ”There are a thousand feelings in a thousand people’s ears.”

From the lesson, I was curious about:’what’s the difference between sound-arts, music and sound design?’ Sound arts should be a kind of major conclusion a form of conceptual art which includes the other two big sound species. I investigated that ‘Sound arts relies on its environment and specific objects, rather than a piece of music that can be picked up and played anywhere.’

During the summer vacation, I went to the exhibition: Bodies of water for a visit and it was the 13th Shanghai Biennale. Honestly speaking, I wanted to find a way to make sound in a visual representation and I found out that there were many sound art related projects in this exhibition. It looks into the liquid nature of human, more-than-human, and post-human bodies, and into the fluid ways in which they infiltrate, constitute, and relate to one another. I could learned the forms of consensual, dissident, and alternative forms of being made by bodies of water.

“We are Particles

Merging in the water, dancing in the wind

Floating, fluxing, and resonating

In the abandoned power station

We breathe the nature”

Bodies of Water

One of my favorite sound art installations in the 13th Shanghai Biennale ‘Bodies of Water’, was from Joan Jonas: “Rivers to the Abyssal Plain“. Based on the work from professor Jeff Peakall from the University of Leeds, Joan Jonas combined painting, video, installation, text and other media to study ocean floor river systems.

Joan Jonas is an American mix media artist. Her projects and experiments were influential in the creation of video performance art as a medium. Her work retells fairy tales and myths from a fresh perspective, creating emotional and visual landscapes which tune into our subconscious experience of the world.

I rehearsed my work only at night, and when I rehearsed, I stepped into another space that was not the same as my everyday space. You could almost call it a séance.

A collage of sound, visuals and emotions, Jonas’s work provides a multitude of viewpoints on our world, our history and humankind.

While talking about her sound work this time, this includes collecting underwater sonar data from the Abyssal fan of the Indian Ocean, the Monterey Canyon, the Bosphorus Strait and the Umnak Channel to observe the Marine life that thrives in the canyon. She painted more than 70 watercolors to take viewers into the unknown costal areas. The theme of “water body” also places the focus of discussion on the harmonious coexistence between human beings and the whole ecosystem.