Month: April 2025

What is Sound Art for me?

Dance, industry, apps, film, acousmatic, ecology, radio, game, animation, mixing, instrument design, immersive media

The three choices we have for next years Sounds Arts course are:

Specialisation, sound for screen and expanded studio practice.

Suzanne Ciani (1946)

Suzanne Ciani was a practitioner of Buchla synthesis, this was a style of electronic music creation formed mostly from modular synths in a performative and abstract way.

Her music is really well toned to a happy feeling, I like her performances in quadraphonic format. She uses space as a compositional tool in her performances, she has good spacial vocabulary.

M108

We went through the specs of room M108, Milo talked through the plug in and run ins off the 8 channel speakers in room 108. I was refreshing to be able to understand how it works, he played some of Ciani (1946) in a 5.1 format. A 5.1 format I found out is a front left and right plus a back left and right with a subs speaker in the middle. It is what is frequently what’s used in cinemas for surround sound.

Sound for visual

We watched a scene from Gravity (2013) and a snippet of a scene from Blade Runner (1982) in this 5.1 format. The difference surround speakers have are incredible, the subwoofer creates a beautiful addition to the ambiance sound for visual if its subtle. “Films are like a long soundtrack with visual attached”.

Serialism – Tonality isn’t used to try and move away from the classic vocabulary. It was very reflective of its time as it was a reflection of the end of the World War in Germany, it is violent at times as there can be something undemocratic about tonal music.

Something about just making music just making music is beautiful. music dousing always need a purpose. Just making music is a meaning, music can ebb and flow on its own. This is called absolute music.

John Chowning (1934)

John Chowning (1934) is an American musical composer that was a crucial part to the creation of FM (Frequency Modulation) synthesis. Frequency Modulation is a technique that enable rich timbres and tone to be formed from algorithms.

Chowning (1934) also gave light to this idea of specialisation. He stimulated his sound in a three dimensional space, he gave the idea of sound moving in 360 degree space using four speakers. He bridged the gap between experimental and music.

Pastiche composition

Pastiche in art refers to the imitation of another art work, this can be to play homage or to ask as a sort of parody but it always has a degree of recognition to the original artwork.

An example of pastiche art are:

Andy Warhol’s “Mona Lisa” (1963):

When talking about sound art, pastiche composition would refer to a sample or mash up of music, for example Bitter Sweet Symphony by The Verve is great example of taking an imitation of a sound and recontexulising it in a different frame

Collage in music:

• Mashing up tapes from different band, cultures and genres
• self sampling, you can sample your own work

The main question we are look at here is where or not art aim is to please or to be owned and institutionalised, in my opinion its both. You have to be happy to share your art but not for someone to steal it, you want credit for the fruits of your labour. I guess as artist we are interested in many different opposing things, so a mash up or collage is an expression of this

Christian Marclay

Christian work at The Tate, is great example of sound as an event happening within time. His work is an example of the presents of time with art, it make you feel present and in the moment. This is a lovely bit of sound art as it depicts the different between sound as an event and sound as a space, I look inline at his work and was impressed by the scale of this project.

What is music concrete?

It’s a style of music practice where a noise is taken out of context and manipulated to change the pace, feel and overall result of the original sound. It breaks away from using recorded sounds rather than traditional music instruments.

Sampling and the Fairlight

Art of noise – Close (1984)

The Art of Noise (1984) by Close is a great example of the early sampling device called a Fairlight and its use. It was one of the first of its kind before digital sampling. A big keyboard that changes a sample and creates something new depending on where you press on the keyboard, high keys create a short but higher pitch whereas lower will bring a different itch.

You can tell a sample by its repetition and consistency, throughout the Art Of Noise (1984) you can see these constant samples pulled from different sources. This a quite a modern example of music concrete.

The Avalanches – Frontier Phschiatrist (2001)

In this sample heavy song they pulled from so many records and samples it was unseen at its time. It has an early hip hop beat behind the various samples of vocals, violins and bird squarks and so on. The reason they pulled areas from different structures is because of the different timbre and noise you get from each sample and record.

Accousmatiuc – Sound that’s decoupled from its source, has no visual implication and becomes its own Sound Object

Is it ethically correct to sample others work?

In class we talked about whether we should credit people when we intend to sample their work or artistic labour.

The Verve – Bitter Sweet Symphony (2009)

Bitter Sweet Symphony (2009) is a great example of the ‘incorrect’ use of sampling. I put the incorrect in quotations because it’s debatable whether or not sampling is a progressive use of artistic expression. The main ‘hook’ of the sound is a sample of a Rolling Stones Instrumental album of ‘The Last Time’ (1965) that they used throughout the song. It brings up a question on whether we as sound artists can hold onto our own labour. I personally think that if you’re a new artist and someone big samples your work it would be good coverage, why can’t it be seen if a smaller artist uses a bigger artists sample? Not sure…

Manipulating some audio we captured

Gareth for the end of lesson told us to go out and find some audio on campus so we could use music concrete techniques to change the sample. I went to the stair well and captured this.

I had to leave early because of work but I went home and used techniques such as Sampler, Simpler and pitch correct to change the sound objects in my recording.

the end result was surprising.

Radiogenic theory

Bibliography

Lacey, K. (2023). Everybody’s Scrapbook: The BBC, radiogenic retrospection and the Mediatisation of Memory. Journal of radio & audio media, 30(2), pp.463–480. doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/19376529.2023.2244486.

Ludwig, M. (2025). Radio; by Rudolf Arnheim, translated by Margaret Ludwig and Herbert Read – Catalogue | National Library of Australia. [online] Nla.gov.au. Available at: https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/catalog/2497755 [Accessed 14 Apr. 2025].