Following lots of diagramming, I could clearly see the gaps in my own knowledge regarding to the ideas of analog audio technology and self-built instruments, namely the Sound Artist areas. This gave me a starting point for the day, to understand further the use of sound in art pieces both through the use of sampling and various other techniques.
Found sound: noise as art
Having found both Gray (Jean-Michel Basquiat's band) and Bon Iver (the composers of the 2016 album 22, A Million) both had drawn inspiration from the work of John Cage, I felt it important to include his works in the research diagram. Using this as a starting point, I read through the PRS for Music article Found sound: noise as art to understand Cage's most renowned piece 4'33" which was composed and first performed in 1952 in Upstate New York.
‘It’s a strange, complex and difficult piece in a way, but in another it’s extremely simple,’ says British composer, producer, author and innovator David Toop. He’s devoted his life to the exploration of sound and music, pioneering new norms along the way' (Nicols, 2017). Cage was fascinated by everyday sounds around us and 'the fact that there is no such thing as absolute silence' which led him to the composition of 4'33" (televised here). The piece, a silent composition lasting exactly 4 minutes and 33 seconds, divided into 3 parts, caused a scandal in the 1950s by framing listening within a particular setting where you'd normally expect to hear music.
This piece forced the audience to 'listen to the world around them, and consider those noises as performance' (Nicols, 2017). This was important to Cage who was aware of the impact of technology on 20th century music. Prior to this date, musicians drew influence from the outside world, emulating noises from nature and industry but once it became possible to record sounds from the outside, the 'recordings suggested you could use sounds as they were - not by imitating them with an oboe, but by actually bringing in the sounds themselves’ (Nicols, 2017).
Influences to Sampling
The ideas surrounding 4'33" can be heard in all kinds of music (including influencing Gray and Bon Iver) from Brian Eno and David Byrne's cut-and-paste tape manipulations, to Depeche Mode's industrial clanging, to more recently, Bonobo's album Mitigations which incorporated found sounds as diverse as an elevator in Hong Kong airport, rain in Seattle, a tumble dryer in Atlanta and a boat engine in New Orleans.
In the digital age, found sound makes increasing sense with the growing synchronisation between sound and vision allowing listeners and creators to become attuned to noise as art. People are much more used to hearing the conventions of combining music with dialogue, sound effects and environmental sound.
More recently, Björk's LP Utopia samples birds, insects and draws directly from David Toop's Hekura (2015). The music she’s making is very much in the digital domain, but then it’s full of birdsong, New Guinean sacred flutes, and so on. Similarly, Maggie Rogers uses the sound of a woodpecker to create percussion sounds for her music. The digital world has allowed for music and art to sample the outside world with greater ease, with recorders in the phones in most of our pockets the access to equipment to create 'instruments' from sound is almost always with us.
Sound Art
Sound art dates back to the early inventions of futurist Luigi Russolo who, between 1913 and 1930, built noise machines that replicated the clatter of the industrial age and the boom of warfare. Marcel Duchamp's composition Erratum Musical featured three voices singing notes pulled from a hat, an arbitrary act which had an impact of on the compositions of John Cage.
By the 1950s and 1960s visual artists and composers like Bill Fontana were using kinetic sculptures and electronic media, overlapping live and pre-recorded sound, in order to explore the space around them. Since the introduction of digital technology sound art has undergone a radical transformation. Artists can now create visual images in response to sounds, allow the audience to control the art through pressure pads, sensors and voice activation.
Contemporary artists who use sound art include Susan Philipsz and Nick Cave, both of which, alongside Luigi Russolo and the Musique Concrete movement, are talked about in more length below.
Luigi Russolo
The original noise artist, Luigi Russolo, was an italian futurist painter and composer who, in 1913, launched his creation of noise music with a manifesto called The Art of Noises. In this, Russolo presents a brief history of sound and music coming into the world before he declared his thesis:
Noise was really not born before the 19th century, with the advent of machinery. Today noise reigns supreme over human sensibility…. Nowadays musical art aims at the shrillest, strangest and most dissonant amalgams of sound. Thus we are approaching noise-sound. This revolution of music is paralleled by the increasing proliferation of machinery sharing in human labor.
Pythagorean theory had stifled creativity, he alleged, “the Greeks… have limited the domain of music until now…. We must break at all cost from this restrictive circle of pure sounds and conquer the infinite variety of noise-sounds.”
To accomplish this objective, the artist created his own series of instruments called the Intonarumori (acoustic noise generators) which could create and control in dynamic and pitch several different types of noises. 'Long before digital samplers and electronic gadgetry used by industrial and musique concrète composers, Russolo relied on purely mechanical devices, though he did make several recordings as well from 1913 to 1921' (Open Culture, 2018).
Russolo's musical contraptions, 27 different varieties, were each named 'according to the sound produced: howling, thunder, crackling, crumpling, exploding, gurgling, buzzing, hissing, and so on.' Many of his own compositions feature string orchestras as well. Russolo introduced his new instrumental music over the course of a few years, debuting an “exploder” in Modena in 1913, staging concerts in Milan, Genoa, and London the following year, and in Paris in 1921.
One 1917 concert apparently provoked explosive violence, an effect Russolo seemed to anticipate and welcome. The Art of Noise derived its influence from every sound of the industrial world, 'and we must not forget the very new noises of Modern Warfare,' he writes, quoting futurist poet Marinetti’s joyful descriptions of the 'violence, ferocity, regularity, pendulum game, fatality' of battle. His noise system, which he enumerates in the treatise, also consists of 'human voices: shouts, moans, screams, laughter, rattlings, sobs.'
Musique Concrète
Created by French composer Pierre Scaeffer, Musique Concrète was an abstraction and mosaic-like process of assembling 'collages of noise' which became a pioneering sound revolution which continues to resonate in modern music today. Never trained as a musician or a composer, Schaeffer worked as a radio engineer when he founded the RTF electronic studio in 1944 to begin his first experiments in what would ultimately be dubbed musique concrète.
Working with found fragments of sound, with origins in both music and the environment, Schaeffer asssembled collages of noise on his first tape-machine pieces, manipulated through changes in pitch, duration and amplitude. The end result was a radical new interpretation of musical form and perception. Schaeffer's broadcast of his first public piece was in 1948 on French radio airwaves and although the public reaction ranged from disbelief to genuine outrage (not unlike the reactions to Luigi Russolo's pieces) many composers and performers interests were piqued.
Among them were Pierre Henry, who in 1949 joined the RTF studio staff as well as future collaborators Luc Ferrari and Lannis Xenakis. Schaeffer forged on, in 1948 completing "Etude Pathetique," which in its frenetic mix of sampled voices anticipated the emergence of hip-hop scratching techniques, over 20 years before the genre was created.
In 1950, Schaeffer and Henry collaborated on a 12-movement piece employing the sounds of the human body. Working with the classically trained Henry on subsequent pieces, informed Schaeffer's later projects, as he soon adopted a more accessible musical approach. Together, the two men also co-founded the Groupe de Musique Concrète in 1951; their studio became the launching pad behind some of the most crucial electronic music compositions of the era, among them Edgard Varèse's 'Deserts'.
However, by the end of the decade most of the GRM's members grew increasingly disenchanted with the painstaking efforts required to construct pieces from vinyl records and magnetic tape; even Schaeffer himself announced his retirement from music in 1960. In 1967, he also published an essay titled "Musique Concrète: What Do I Know?" which largely dismissed the principles behind his groundbreaking work, concluding that what music now needed was 'searchers', not 'auteurs'.
Steve Reich
Influenced heavily by the father of 'minimalism' (the reduction of music to a fixed pulse with lucid harmonic and melodic repetition) La Monte Young who impacted many New York composers in the 1960s with pieces such as 'Composition 1960 #7' which consisted of just one two-note chord, Steve Reich began experimenting in another aspect of minimalism: phasing. Phasing, the gradual change of pulse of one repeated against another, is experimented with by Reich in some of his most well known and first major pieces such as 'It's Gonna Rain' (1965).
It's Gonna Rain's source material consists entirely of a tape recording made in 1964 at San Francisco's Union Square which includes a pentecostal preacher speaking of the end of the world alongside accompanying background noises such as the noises of pigeons taking flight. The opening of the piece starts with the preacher telling the story of Noah, stating 'It's Gonna Rain' which is repeated and eventually looped throughout the first half of the piece. For recording the piece, Reich used two normal Wollensak tape recorders to play the same recording, one forwards and the other backwards, originally with the intention of attempting to align the phrase 'It's Gonna Rain' with itself at the halfway point (180 degrees).
However, due to the imprecise technology in 1965, the two recordings fell out of sync, with one tape gradually falling ahead or behind the other due to minute differences in the machines, the length of the spliced tape loops, and playback speed. Reich decided to exploit what is known as phase shifting, where all possible recursive harmonies are explored before the two loops eventually get back in sync. The work is in two parts of roughly equal length, the first using the "It's Gonna Rain" sample as mentioned above, the second using a separate section of the speech with short phrases cut together and the resultant pattern then phased as in the first part, but with additional tape delay to create a more processed sound.
During a lecture, electronic musician Brian Eno cited It's Gonna Rain as his first experience with minimalism and the genre that would come to be known as ambient music.
Contemporary Sound Artists
Nick Cave
Born in 1959 in Missouri, US, Nick Cave is a sculptor, dancer and performance artist whose artistic interests arose from his time manipulating fabrics from older sibling's hand me downs. Cave claims that his upbringing in a large family with these sorts of experiences gave him an attentiveness to found objects and assemblages. As an artist, Cave often discusses with his work the experiences that force him to confront his identity as a black man and how they fuel his impulse to create.
Cave is best known for his Soundsuits: wearable fabric sculptures that are bright, whimsical and other-worldly. The Soundsuits originated as metaphorical suits of armor in response to the Rodney King beatings and have evolved into vehicles for empowerment. Fully concealing the body, the “Soundsuits” serve as an alien second skin that obscures race, gender, and class, allowing viewers to look without bias towards the wearer’s identity.
The Soundsuits hide gender, race, class and they force you to look at the work without judgement.
Fully concealing the body, the Soundsuits serve as an alien second skin that obscures race, gender, and class, allowing viewers to look without bias towards the wearer’s identity. Cave regularly performs in the sculptures himself, dancing either before the public or for the camera, activating their full potential as costume, musical instrument, and living icon. Cave’s sculptures also include non-figurative assemblages, intricate accumulations of found objects that project out from the wall, and installations enveloping entire rooms.
Susan Philipsz
Susan Philipsz is a Scottish artist based in Berlin who works with spaces, narrative and sounds. In 2010 she won the Turner Prize which was the first time a sound work was nominated and in 2014 she was awarded an OBE. Similarly to Luigi Russolo, her sound installation War Damaged Musical Instruments explores the destruction of war.
Philipsz uses recordings, mainly of her own singing voice and projects this sound into a space. Her voice is untrained and she leaves in breaths and imperfections to create a sense of intimacy. Alongside this, Philipsz has used found sound through reworked songs varying from traditional folk music and sixteenth century ballads to songs by Nirvana, David Bowie etc.
Showing a keen interest in how sound can trigger memory and emotions, Philipsz explores familiar themes of loss, longing, hope and return although each of her pieces is unique in both sound and location. Philipsz’ work responds directly to the site in which the piece is installed with several of her sound pieces located to be heard in out-of-the-way spaces such as alleyways and underpasses (Lowlands, 2010: found here) to very public bus stations and supermarkets. By placing audio pieces in an urban environment she examines more closely the architecture and spaces around us. This interest in exploring a geographic location and the effect it has on our emotions and behaviour is sometimes called psychogeography.
Sound is materially invisible but very visceral and emotive. It can define a space at the same time as it triggers a memory. Susan Philipsz
This is by all means not an exhaustive list of sound artists to add to the diagram, which will be developed and added to over the course of the semester anyway, but for now is a keen start and one which will form connections between the sound art section alongside many other areas of the diagram.
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