Imagine a world where sound is the one sense we have to navigate our way around the landscape. For a small but growing number of post-modern sonic sculptors this fantasy has become reality. Hovering on the cusp of the arts world, audio artists are manipulating sound to create unique aural environments. The aim is to transport listeners to new realms of perception and understanding. This is conceptual art of the highest order.
American audio artist David Moss describes it as “the momentary manifestation of personal timing and eccentric personality that occurs while dealing with materials of choice (musical instruments, objects, airwaves, etc.) broadcast over TIME…… Its power lives in the territory of surprise, in the landscape of possibilities. It is an architecture of individuality, a helix of memories always just diving into, or emerging from, a pool of chaos.” So audio art is not music in the commercial, structured, manufactured for market, sense of the word. It is unique to the artist and the materials being used.
Audio artists have been evolving their expression throughout the twentieth century but the genre emerged in force during the 1980s, following the advent of new and affordable machines to record and manipulate sound. Of the early adherents, the late John Cage is probably the best known. Cage’s output was as complex as his character and even though he described his work as music, he certainly operated within the realms of the audio artist.
An autobiographical statement has him saying: “We are living in a period in which many people have changed their mind about what the use of music is or could be for them. Something that doesn’t speak or talk like a human being, that doesn’t know its definition in the dictionary or its theory in the schools, that expresses itself simply by the fact of its vibrations. People paying attention to vibratory activity, not in reaction to a fixed ideal performance, but each time attentively to how it happens to be this time, not necessarily two times the same. A music that transports the listener to the moment where he is.”
Whilst audio artists would claim their focus is not on creating a product that can be reproduced and sold, there are outlets helping to generate increasing interest in the genre and a market for recordings. 2005 will see international festivals and concerts of audio art taking place in Poland and Canada. In Germany, spiritual home of avante garde electronica, there will be an international conference on sonic art in August. But appealing to new audiences is still something of a challenge, particularly in countries that do not have the benefit of a strong post-modernist tradition. According to Jorge Gomez, one of Venezuela’s foremost sound artists, “the major challenge for us doing radio-art is that we have to educate the public to have active attention, to put an effort into what is being listened to in order to see mental images.”
Predictably the Internet has opened up a realm of possibilities and new audiences to audio art. One website invites anyone to post recordings of noise, although whether these are taken to constitute works of art is unclear. They are certainly interesting and able to transport the listener to a different place in time. Similarly at Japan’s Future University, students were invited to record everyday sounds such as a train in motion and manipulate the recordings to create ‘sound gardens‘. Listening to the resultant tracks on the Internet, one cannot help engage with the sounds and have ‘an experience’ of some kind through the internalisation of foreign noise played out of context. In other words, the brains of the audience reconfigure the context of the sound to give it meaning.
For Rupert Huber, one of Germany’s and the world’s most successful audio artists (and also a renowned composer of music in the more traditional sense), the manner in which the sounds are created is as much a hallmark of audio art as the end result. “I could characterize my intentions but not my musical results, and I enjoy the fact that my intentions are sometimes very different from the way the music sounds. Given that our world is full of unforeseeable acoustic events, it is very useful to write music that is not disturbed, but enriched by the unpredictable,” he says.
A willingness to embrace aleatory elements in the creation process is liberating in itself. Indeed it one of the characteristics of post-modern expression, realised most explicitly through glitch art – the audio and/or visual representation of randomly occurring errors in otherwise functioning computers. The development of this art form is not quite as haphazard or without effort on the part of the artist as such a simple definition would suggest, and often involves complex stages of processing information over long periods of time.
The accessibility of audio art, whether as randomly recorded sounds, computer generated glitch art, or carefully constructed sequences of noise is questionable. Hence, community or not-for-profit radio is the obvious home for an art form too weird to get air play on commercial radio stations. Because they can stream to audiences over the Internet, these small independent purveyors of sound are far more likely to be found by searching audiences. London’s Resonance FM, one such community radio station, describes itself as the city’s ‘first art radio station.’ The constant press interest it has stimulated would suggest there is a significant potential audience willing to listen to noise that defies the description of music in the conventional sense. Telegraph arts critic Rupert Christiansen argues that spontaneity is the missing factor in much of contemporary art, and is therefore the appeal of the aural fare served up on the Resonance FM plate.
Audio art is very much of its time. Without late twentieth century advances in recording and digital technology, along with the Internet, it would be difficult to imagine that audio art would ever have reached out to a global audience. In attracting the interest of audience and musicians, audio art increasingly serves to blur the line between music and noise. And now that electronic sound has become part of mainstream music culture, it is difficult to imagine interest in audio art entering into decline.
