Sound Art – the Politics of Representation, Truth and Listening.

James Wyness

Introduction

Western political art is often characterised as revolutionary. We think of the revolutionary avant-garde of the early 20th century influenced by the writings of utopian socialists before ‘avant-garde’ was re-defined as an independent aesthetic. We also think of protest culture expressed through a range of art forms. In the current political climate I would argue that it has become increasingly difficult to present artistic content as political, particularly in works of visual art. Corporate advertising and the popular media have appropriated so much that even irony and satire are problematic. There is an overwhelming commodification of ‘high’ art and of musical products. Indeed there has been much debate by cultural theorists on the extent to which the creative arts in general have been compromised and whether they can still offer critical political comment. In this context I want to consider sound art and the politics of representation, truth and listening.

The term ‘sound art’ is notoriously elastic. It is used freely according to a flexible range of subjective
criteria. There are assumptions about its essence and intentions and there are a range of practices which both confirm and reject these assumptions. The metanarratives of art and music history with their respective canons are insufficient; a history of sound art is subsumed by histories of listening techniques and habits, of technological development, of institutional strategies and educational values, of commercial and advertising practices and of representational forms found and manipulated by the artists, the media and corporate institutions. In examining these we enter the fields of power, politics and ideology.

Fields of Practice

Sound art is an emerging field of loosely related practices lacking a core practice. It is evolving rapidly as new practices come into play. No-one has written a definitive history and overview of sound art and there is no single authoritative method of analysing and describing the full range of practices. Borrowing from musicological methods, we might well look at poiesis (intention) and esthesis (reception) but we would find that intention and reception are often totally at odds. Many artists claim to be making sound art when there are valid reasons to support the view that they are extending musical practice. Others claim that recorded natural sound is both music and art at the same time. Music and Art are heavily laden signifiers. In addition most artists don’t care for categorisation. They simply and at times inconspicuously get on with the job. I have therefore adopted the pragmatic approach of clustering similar practices together whilst considering the practices or fields from which they might have emerged, all the time acknowledging that there are many mergings and hybrids, beyond which there lie unclassifiable practices. Almost without exception, sound art practice is mediated by recording and playback technology. I say ‘almost’; there are artists who investigate
silence, who simply walk and document, who map various soundscapes using visual media.

Having set out my caveats and disclaimers, I propose four overlapping fields of sound art practice: the
extension and development of musical practice; technological sound art including sound sculpture; sound art based on the voice; environmental sound art. Having worked to an extent in all these fields, I would suggest that the politics of environmental sound art merit further investigation.

Following an overview of sound art practice, therefore, I will look at the extent to which the constituting practices of environmental sound art are politically engaged by investigating two specific contexts: the politics of representation and truth, and the politics of listening. I refrain from mentioning or recommending artists as I would encourage the reader to use initiative and creativity in making their own investigations.

Sound Art as an Extension and Development of Musical Practice

The practices in this category generally align themselves with electronic music. In addition to signal processing techniques, conventional musical instruments are extended, virtual digital and analogue instruments are created or hacked out from old circuitry. Occasionally all these elements are found in the work of a single artist. Musical features such as pulse, texture, polyphony and dynamic direction are common. Many artists in this field disseminate their material in the social context of a live stage based performance (fixed or improvisatory) in a club or concert environment, frequently accompanied by projected visuals, often for no particular reason. Besides live performance, material is often distributed as hard copy CDs or online mp3 downloads.

Here there are clear developments from earlier practices: the avant-gardes of the United States and of Europe, musique concrete in its academic and concert manifestations, dance music, especially in its more ‘intelligent’ forms, dj culture (the turntablist’s art is ever developing), and ambient music. There are concerns with the materiality of sound, and with the upper and lower limits of audibility.

A possible reason for labelling certain practices as sound art rather than music is that no formal musical
training is needed to produce work. Training can help, but can just as easily get in the way. composition or improvisation is largely done by ear. There is often an emphasis on new ways of listening, as unwanted, unusual or even scorned sounds are appropriated and presented. Certain ambient forms are interesting in that their aesthetic is based on encouraging shallower listening with less engagement.

Gallery Sound Art

Here I am referring to speakers and other sounding devices in galleries, often presented as beautiful objects and accompanied by other media. Concepts can be as important as the actual sound. Sound sculpture sits well in this category in its investigation of physical space. New developments in digital technology tend to be rolled out in this context.

Sound may be a secondary detail in the work if the technological concept and mediation process are under investigation. Psychoacoustic phenomena, unusual attributes of sounds and the ways in which we perceive them under certain conditions, are often explored both visually and sonically. Works frequently reveal and explore specific scientific discoveries. Interactivity is common, with audiences as active or passive agents. Listening in different ways is encouraged. Although musical listening is rarely a primary concern artists often re-contextualise their work as music, presenting it on fixed media or as mp3 downloads.

Work with strong visual interest and spatial and sculptural approaches to sound sits well within the contemporary visual arts tradition. Such work usually finds support from within visual arts institutions. Occasionally curators and others will parade sound work under the ‘new media’ banner, wrongly in my opinion. Sound is an essential medium. It’s as old as the hills. Finally, certain practices extend into the environment outside of the gallery, working for example with unconventional sounding sculptures or mobile media devices.

Sound Art using Voice and Language

This wide ranging practice is characterised by the use of spoken language as abstract or as signifying material. Practices draw inspiration from the fields of theatre, poetry and literary forms in general. The absurd, surrealism and dada are significant historical influences. Typical presentational forms include radio, live performance, fixed medium and online download. The history of broadcasting, histories of communication and cultural histories are relevant fields of research in studying these forms.

Environmental Sound Art

For some time the arts have reached out into the larger natural, urban and cultural environment, enlarging the scope of art by examining the relationship between the aesthetics of environment and of art, and challenging values promoted by traditional aesthetic theory.

The term environmental sound art is useful in highlighting sound as belonging originally to the environment. What is the environment? Rather than being something ‘out there’ environment intrigues artists as an interpenetration of body and place. Person and environment are continuous. Environmental experience changes constantly, defying detached contemplation. Crucially, we necessarily bring our cultural values to our experience of environmental ‘reality’. Environmental sound art sets out to capture and re-render sonic aspects of the environment. Like photography and the moving image it frames elements of the experience, offering multiple meanings in the process. Environmental sound art practices are bound up, like photography, in problems of representation. A list of typical practices would include: ‘phonographic’ practices which privilege the capture of interesting or unusual environmental sounds or sonic events, occasionally with human intervention and often with musical intentions; nature recording, which ranges from simple sonic capture to complex sound mapping; soundscape art with a range of possible intentions, from ambient to musical to scientific; documentary and archival forms where events of human, social and environmental interest are investigated and re-rendered. Practices can be diffuse and investigative over long durations, hard to define in the research and development phases, and consequently hard to present to institutional funding bodies. Presentational forms include virtually every known form of sound reproduction.

These attempts to frame the frameless investigate the dialectic between the raw sonic material of the environment and its informational content. They frequently exhibit an instructive agenda relating to listening habits, inherited from musique concrete’s contemporary manifestation as acousmatic music. They rely on technological mediation, often well disguised and offered up as simple capture and re-rendering. In spacespecific multi-channel installation work, the whole body is often the necessary condition of perception. New productions of space and place are offered, depth is emphasised over width, the parochial treated as a window into the universal.

There are several histories in play: architecture (in the sense of shaping space), land art, landscape art, sculpture and installation, electroacoustic musical research and practice, photography, conceptual art, found art, acoustic ecology, soundscape art, documentary forms, art dealing with archive and mapping, ethnography, Japanese and other eastern practices and aesthetics. This last strand is intriguing in its challenge to unrestrained opulence and excess. Notions of impermanence and austere beauty expressed through sound question conventional representational models.

The Politics of Representation and Truth

Regardless of content, environmental sound art has already entered the political domain by offering a critique of dominant forms of institutionalised representation. We are invited to examine the apparently seamless models of representation currently on offer and to ‘see the joins’. At this point it would help to look at definitions of ideology. In ‘The German Ideology’ of 1846 Marx and Engels defined ideology as a set of values and beliefs ambiguously dependent on the process of material production. Ideologies are promoted to foster the belief that the values being set are not just those of the promoter but those of society at large. One feminist definition describes ideology as an all-informing complex
of social practices and systems of representation. Where values are promoted by means of representational models we are firmly in the domain of ideology and politics.

Why has one set of representational norms come to dominate? Are others possible and can they resist
misappropriation? The realist mode is the dominant form of signification in contemporary Western society. It is hard set but limited, complicit with dominant sociolects (languages associated with particular groups) and prevalent among the dominant ideological forms. In the realistic mode the fixed signifier is treated as if it were identical with a pre-existent signified. Product is stressed and production repressed, reducing us to consumers and denying our existence as historical subjects. Crucially, powerful structures rest comfortably on these versions of the truth, enabling a raft of products and socio-political values to be traded. Cultural theorists, philosophers and artists have asked questions of representational forms for years. What is real? Are photographs real? Is recorded sound real? Is anything absolute or are all interpretations relative? Is advertising art? Can phonographic forms achieve anything in terms of critical integrity that photographic forms cannot?

Politics is about many things but above all it is about power and versions of the truth. According to Michel Foucault, the relation between truth and power is dialectical; there is a regime of truth, a political, economic and institutional regime of the production of truth, found equally outside of the coercive and oppressive arms of the State in such public bodies as educational institutions. Sound artists dealing with matters of representation are by definition challenging these regimes of truth. They are working at a very basic level towards constructing a new politics of truth by methodically dislocating the regime’s power from the specific privileged forms in which it operates.

Many environmental sound art practices are discursive in nature, embodied in technical processes, in
individuals, groups and institutions, in methods of transmission and diffusion. By shedding light on the
questioning process we encourage listeners to ask similar questions of dominant forms of signification. John Tagg asks, “how does a given practice exist and operate, how does it comment on its context rather than present it as real, how does it give rise to meaning rather than state it as true, in which contexts do we accept it as real or true, and what are the consequences of doing so“. Environmental sound art production is a highly political process, an antidote to the anaesthetic of contemporary institutional or conventional representational discourse. The struggle, if there is one, is not a struggle for ‘truth’ but, rather, a struggle around the status of truth and the economic and political that it plays in our lives.

Listening: a a selection of illustrative sound files is available by clicking here

James Wyness is a composer and environmental sound artist living in Jedburgh in the Scottish Borders. His electroacoustic compositions have been awarded internationally and are regularly played and performed in the UK, Europe and in North and South America.

His work as an environmental sound artist broadly investigates the representation of the human and natural environment. Consciously posing as an ethnographer faced with social ritual, his recent work explores the dynamic relationship between the exotic and the everyday, resulting in a variety of forms; sound installation, radio work, web presentation, text based forms and more recently the moving image. In relation to the natural environment his work is research based and exploits documentary and archival forms.

Current projects include the documentation in sound and text of features of Harestanes Country Park in the Scottish Borders, culminating in a sound installation at the Visitor’s Centre from April – June 2009.

A full cv can be found at his homepage http://www.wyness.org/