Sound Art – Interesting Finds

The Singing Ringing Tree – Mike Tonkin and Anna Liu of Tonkin Liu

The Singing Ringing Tree is an architectural project under the Panopticon project by Mid Pennine Arts. Constructed with galvanised stainless steel pipes, the Singing Ringing Tree is a sculpture that overlooks Burnley in England, and creates sounds using natural winds that blow across the sculpture. Through clever variations in the width as well as curvature of the pipes, the architects allowed the sculpture to have an aural range of seven octaves.

I feel that this piece of art is a stroke of genius as the artists were able to bring about an aural experience to something as natural as wind which would otherwise have been ignored as environmental noise. Not many notice the subtleties in the sounds that winds make, and this sculpture is about to shed light and bring attention to artistic and aesthetic potential in a force of nature that was once latent.

 

The Whispering Room – Janet Cardiff

http://www.cardiffmiller.com/artworks/inst/whispering_room.html

 

The Whispering Room is an installation by Janet Cardiff, which consists of 16 speakers in a dark room where a video plays. Through the 16 different speakers, a different voice is heard in each one and across speakers, certain dialogues can be heard. By walking around the room, the audience would be able to make out a story by carefully listening to the conversations that the individual speakers have.

I feel that this piece was innovative and incredibly immersive as it requires the audience to move around the room and interact with the speakers. By forcing the audience to paint a picture in their head through the information that they receive from the speakers, Cardiff creates a unique environment where audiences are able to immerse themselves in a story that she has created, making them want to find out more, and they would only be able to do so through multiple listens of the numerous voices. Her idea to use sound and dialogue as a means to tell a story instead of simply playing a video with audio truly captures the essence of art in sound.

Sound Art – Reading Assignment

  1. What is sound?

Sound, by a very physical definition, refers to vibrations that travel through the air or another medium and can be heard when they reach a person’s or animal’s ear. In art, sound commonly refers to music. In a musical point of view, music can be composed of organized sounds and silence, as proposed by Edgard Varese and John Cage respectively. Very broadly, sound refers to the aural component of almost any and every activity.

 

  1. How has it been use in culture and society?

Sound is the crux of communication; to speak, to record and to communicate verbally all hinge on the very essence of sound. Sound can be represented in art through a variety of exhibitions, which include, and are not exclusive to, music, kinetic sculptures and conceptual art pieces. The most notable example of sound as art comes in the form of popular music.

 

  1. What makes it an art?

Sound can add complexity to art pieces for audiences of art. Through several layers of sounds, listening to an audio piece repeatedly can provide more and more information to an audience for them to better paint a picture of what goes on in an art piece by allowing them to pay more attention to subtleties in the audio piece that they would not have noticed before. Such subtleties include the noises the recording instruments make, or the sounds of the environment in the backdrop of the tape. The lack of sound can also add to the overall aesthetic of an art piece. For example, silence can invoke mystery or suspense in an audience. Through manipulations of sounds, artists will be able to express themselves and invoke thoughts and feelings in an audience, which serves the same purpose as art.

 

  1. How does advancement in audio technology affect our sense?

 

The development of phonography has undoubtedly allowed for better freedom of expression for sound artists by allowing sounds to be more reproducible and editable. Through recordings artists would be able to add several layers to sounds to perfect the audio piece that they want to send out. One example lies in pop music, where artists pile layers and layers of beats and sound effects to mask surface noise and create a more enjoyable audio pleasure. Artists may also choose to emphasise on surface noise as a tool to invoke suspense, as Theodor Adorno had pointed out.