The Lives of Sonified Images

Contemporary sonic artworks often use field recordings from places of historic or social significance to address political issues. This article discusses relevant works for radio and fixed media by Peter Cusack, Jacob Kirkegaard, Eliška Cílková, Anna Friz and Public Studio, Stéphane Garin and Sylvestre Gobart, Ultra-red, and Matthew Herbert and outlines how they use both audio and visual/textual information to create awareness of the issues inscribed in these places, from current environmental concerns to the memory of genocide and displacement.

One of the newer tendencies in contemporary sound art is the use of scientific modes of data collection through laboratory set ups or field recordings, as it is for instance seen in media artist Anne Niemetz' and nano-scientist Andrew Pelling's The Dark Side of the Cell (2004) or Katie Egan and Joe Davies Audio Microscope (2000). This article tries to describe how the sound experience is conditioned by such art projects. The main argument in the article is that in such art projects we are not just experiencing ‘the world’, ‘the sound’, ‘the technology’ or ‘the listening’ but the mediating gesture happening between these positions. In order to describe this complex mediating operation the article uses a variety of media and intermedial theory particularly Lars Elleströms (Elleström, 2010) distinctions between qualified, basic and technical media. The latter is used to describe how the intermediality of such sound art projects is not just between conventional medias of art – as for instance text and sound – but between very different media aspects such as “sound” and “microphone” and “art”. On behalf of such an analysis the article claims that these art projects can be seen as an articulation of an auditory turn, in which sound no longer appears to be a transparent channel between us and the world, but rather a media conditioning that which is experienced.

2019

Purpose – Racialised misrepresentation circulated en masse can be understood as a form of symbolic and cultural violence. Such misrepresentations create a dominant cultural narrative that positions people of African background as violent and troubled and therefore incompatible with Australian society. Young people from various groups have been using arts-for-social-change to challenge and dismantle these imposed misrepresentation and reconstruct narratives that reflect their lived experiences. The purpose of this paper is to explore sound portraits, both the process and product, by tracing the journey of New Change, arts collective comprised of young women of African heritage, who have been pushing for social change. Design/methodology/approach – This collaborative research mobilises arts methodologies, bringing together sound arts, audio documentary and narrative research methods. Data gathering included arts artefacts and interviews with the young women and sound recordings from news media to craft a sound portrait entitled “Battle for truth”. Findings – Battle for Truth is a sound portrait that serve as the findings for this paper. Sound portraits privilege participants’ voices and convey the complexity of their stories through the layering of voices and other soundscapes. This sound portrait also includes a media montage of racialised misrepresentation. Social implications – Through their restorying, sound portraits are a way to counter passive and active forgetting and wilful mishearing, creating a space in the public memory for polyphonic voices and stories that have been shutout. Sound portraits necessitate reflexivity and dialogue through deep listening, becoming important sites for reimagining possibilities for social change and developing new activist avenues. Originality/value – This paper brings together sonic methods, liberation arts and social justice perspectives to attend to power, race, gender and voice.

The Noises of Art addresses what is arguably the most prolific, varied, and groundbreaking period in the coming together, exchange, and mutual influence of visual art and sound-based practices (such as music and the spoken word). It aims to explore (principally) the visual artist’s engagement with sound, noise, music, and text while at the same time recognizing that there is a traffic of musicians, sound artists, and text artists moving in the opposite direction, who aspire to cultivate visual analogues for their work. Thus, the conference is situated at the intersection of several movements that are converging upon a point of visual-audio synthesis and exchange.

This essay offers a path across some of the essays in this volume exploring the relationship between image and sound in cinema. Heeding different voices from film criticism (considered as criticism of mainly Western feature cinema) and documentary filmmaking, where the voice is discussed in its narrative and technical function, the author aims at listening to cinema, rather than watching it, in order to hear the mechanism that makes this social and cultural technology work. Though cinema technology allows for a complete separation of the voice from the body that originates it, feature films suture image and voice to create a unitary body for its characters and stories. In documentary film, on the other hand, the audience is led by a voice apparently coming from outside the frame, sutured to no body at all; this voice can taint the representation of the ‘real’ with the uncanny voice of the machine, as in the work of experimental film- and documentary-makers from Lynch to David Cronenberg, Trinh T. Minh-ha and Chris Marker, plunging deeper and deeper into the displacing qualities of the voice of cinema.

2018

This book is about the interrelationships between hearing and listening, looking and seeing. In both cases, one does not presuppose the other; we are perfectly capable of hearing without listening, just as seeing takes us beyond the utility of simply looking. Likewise, it is the hope behind this book that by awakening the faculty of seeing, we may enhance our ability to listen-and vice versa. Hence, there is quite a lot of visual art in this book, but I hope the reader will join me in the galleries I visit on the way, because it is not as an art critic but as a seeker after sound that I make these excursions. In my other writings, radio-in all its changing times and formats-has been a key element, and it is a thread here too, for after all, does not radio contain the most memorable pictures of all? It is also, as I never tire of discussing, a poetic medium in essence, and the argument of the book utilises some of the word/sound images and pictures that poetry provides in its gallery of the imagination. There is then, here a kind of tapestry of art, poetry and a sense and awareness of Place, triggering sound by association, memory and empathy with our surroundings, our circumstances and our fellow inhabitants of the planet, heard and unheard. It is about the murmurs of voice and locality, the whispers in the air, the water and the landscape, the brush of sand over rock, the faint single notes that build from a fragile hint of a presence to become part of the symphony of sounds with which we are surrounded, the sonic context of life. These are the component parts of our sound kaleidoscope, and my preoccupation here is with deconstructing processes culminating in the x PREFACE homogenised end-product of a choir of voices that sometimes makes music, sometimes noise. It all begins as an instant of sound, whole and complete in itself, as a single drop of rain makes its mark on stone, before the deluge drowns it and it becomes engulfed in the flood. As before, particularly in my last work for Palgrave, Sound Poetics: Interaction and Personal Identity (2017), the narrative will be told from the perspective of a poet and a radio practitioner; the book is based principally on my own reflections drawn from a life of gathering and listening to and for sound, and attempting to translate the world into words in my poetry, a life I've been privileged to share with gifted friends and colleagues from the world of sound and literature, some of whom have been kind enough to share their insights here. This is an exploration of the significance that lies in the often-missed sounds of life and an attempt to champion attentiveness to them. It is about deconstructing the world's orchestra and hearing the subtleties that lie almost concealed in the sound work of which we are a part. To return to the analogy of fine art, I would have us consider the journey upon which we are about to embark as an examination of the act of making. The pointeliste technique of artists such as Seurat may be a clue to uncover meaning, purpose and intent within this context: tiny dots of light and colour that go to make up, through their presence and company, the whole picture. We will begin then with what we might well call 'talking pictures.' Sometimes these pictures are on walls, sometimes they are moving around us and sometimes they are within us, but always they speak, and what they have to say is key to our understanding of the world, if we have eyes to hear and ears to see.

2014

In this paper I explore the concepts of sound and silence focusing upon creative modalities for the dissemination of oral history materials. In doing so I focus upon two sound installations: Witness (2000) by Susan Hiller, in which second-hand accounts of extra-terrestrial sightings were exhibited; and The Young Voices Soundscape (2012), in which I exhibited a collection of sound recordings of young people’s first-hand accounts of concerns about their social inclusion. In particular, I examine Hiller’s methods of preserving, managing, curating and distributing the various materials generated through the collection of oral histories, which have been catalytic to my own work. The concepts of sound and silence are approached within the context of uncovering silent histories as a practice of oral history that gives ‘voice’ to stories that might otherwise remain unheard. Drawing upon a number of theoretical frameworks including the philosophies of sound art as well as poststructuralist a...

SoundEffects - An Interdisciplinary Journal of Sound and Sound Experience, 2011

One of the newer tendencies in contemporary sound art is the use of scientific modes of data collection through laboratory set ups or field recordings, as it is for instance seen in media artist Anne Niemetz' and nano-scientist Andrew Pelling's The Dark Side of the Cell (2004) or Katie Egan and Joe Davies Audio Microscope (2000). This article tries to describe how the sound experience is conditioned by such art projects. The main argument in the article is that in such art projects we are not just experiencing ‘the world’, ‘the sound’, ‘the technology’ or ‘the listening’ but the mediating gesture happening between these positions. In order to describe this complex mediating operation the article uses a variety of media and intermedial theory particularly Lars Elleströms (Elleström, 2010) distinctions between qualified, basic and technical media. The latter is used to describe how the intermediality of such sound art projects is not just between conventional medias of art – a...

The experimental sound practices extend the acoustic referent of the conflict and produce cultural objects related to experiences of violence, displacement and social disparity. The Panel on Sonology will gather five artists-researchers whose works allow us to reflect on the role of music, sound art and sound design on communities disturbed by social inequality and violence. From different perspectives, the panelists will show personal modes of sonifying the conflict, discussing artistic experiences where experimental sound practices have been introduced in communities traced by social disruption: (1) Musical instrument building in the periphery, by Tomas Laurenzo (2) Acoustemology of the Armed Conflict in San Juan Nepomuceno, by Luz Eneida Ramirez, Mestizo Machines by Jorge Barco, (4) Sound: expression of the conflict and pedagogical tool, by Joaquin Llorca and (5) In the interstices of a memorial: A Review on Triangulation Gender Sound Technology, by Ana Maria Romano G.