Lucy Raven

For six weeks this spring in New York City, thirteen diverse, independently planned exhibitions of sound art will open at a range of venues, from The Kitchen and Art in General to Creative Time and free103point9, in what The Kitchen’s director Elise Bernhardt describes as a “cosmic convergence.” Coinciding with the 25th anniversary of New Music, New York—the 1979 event at The Kitchen that broke the city’s downtown experimental music scene internationally with performances by composers Laurie Anderson, Robert Ashley, Philip Glass, Pauline Oliveros, and Steve Reich, among others—these six weeks of sound art should draw attention to the changing role of sound in space: public, private, and virtual. This spring’s confluence of concerts, festivals, and exhibitions indicates the rumblings of a new movement to bring those shifts into earshot, diagramming their overlap as a corporeal sphere of listening.

Each venue is committed to presenting sound in site-specific installations, complicating the projects’ archiving or commodifying. At The Kitchen, sound art pioneer Charles Morrow will present what he calls a sound cube, a 3D audio environment with multichannel playback where newly commissioned work from 12 sound artists will be broadcast. Art in General will present a group exhibition called Rock’s Role, After Ryoanji, a selection of sound works responding to John Cage’s musical transliterations of the famed Japanese Zen rock garden, Ryoanji. The exhibition description explains that “the sound works will be arranged spatially and temporally so that they can be heard, in the exhibition space, both in isolation and simultaneously.” Harvestworks will conduct a three-day symposium on responsive environments and new technologies, and Cooper Union will host a series of public lectures called “Resonating Frequencies: Dialogues on Architecture and Music.” The stimuli behind the convergence, however, may be most perceptible in listening to the installations themselves.

Many younger artists working in sound are rooted in a legacy that includes the experimental musicians named above, but, significantly, they have incorporated a pronounced set of physical dimensions to the acoustic structure of their projects. Artist, curator, electronic musician, and Kitchen archivist Stephen Vitiello, who has pieces in several shows around the city this spring, creates work that explores the physical aspects of sound and its potential to define the form and atmosphere of a specific space. His 1999 work, World Trade Center Recordings: Winds After Hurricane Floyd, was made by placing contact microphones on the windows of his 91st-story studio in the World Trade Center. Vitiello’s recordings of the noises of Tower One swaying under stress from the winds are at once miniscule and boundless, and remain an oft-referenced vertex in sound art’s expanding scaffold. It is a remarkable piece for its sonic recording of the air’s displacement by the tower, and for its exposure of the cracks in even the most massive of edifices; its power as a sonic document is especially profound and relevant now as a unique spatial artifact of the collapsed buildings.

This relationship between sound and space has a precedent in Pythagoras’ music of the spheres—the thought that each of the seven planets produces in its orbit a particular note according to its distance from the stationary center of the earth. By the time the earliest recording technologies were being developed, the expansive dimensionality of the spheres had been brought inside and boxed into cylinders, eventually being flattened out entirely into disks. It was the first time one could hear one’s own voice objectively, outside the body, where it could be stopped, repeated, and muted. The expanse between earth and the cosmos contemplated by Pythagoras remains an object of fascination, perhaps because evidence of the distance between them is ever more apparent. However, the space between the body and the voice initiated by early sound recording technology introduced an entirely new dynamic, exteriorizing an interior voice that had heretofore been inextricable from the body.

Phonography and gramography established a new sense of temporality that allowed for multiple layers of time to be heard at once. As Jonathan Sterne notes in the fascinating last chapter of his book The Audible Past, “If there was a defining figure in early accounts of sound recording, it was the possibility of preserving the voice beyond the death of the speaker.” This promise of the preservative power of recording technology resonated especially for the Victorians, for whom death was already characterized by auditory properties. The ultimate warning before the Grim Reaper’s approach was the death rattle, and Spiritualist table-knocking channeled important codes of communication from the dead. Wax cylinders were used to make many of these initial recordings, thereby helping to perpetuate a myth of sound recording’s permanence in a culture obsessed with preservation; the same wax was used for the widespread practices of embalming and canning. Nevertheless, the endurance of this technology was more imagined than real.

While death for our culture has been nearly silenced as even a topic of discussion, let alone a communal event with sonic vocabulary, “canned sound” has become a backdrop drone; preservatives of all sorts (from chemical foodstuffs to Botox and silicon) have become fully incorporated into a larger model of consumption, rendering them nearly unnoticeable. The sounds of machination have also been muted as the distance between the products we consume and their manufacture continues to grow, and the chord that once connected them becomes untraceable. Commerce is increasingly conducted over the internet, and home theater systems stage multidimensional time and space experiences inside the home. Indeed, even the way we “experience” war in the United States is often in surround sound on the same couch in front of which teams of tanned singles tug-of-war on Survivor. Dolby 5.1 sound has made available a new specialized, spatialized context for listening, while also breaking new technological ground for the presentation of sound in space. What’s emitted from home theater speakers, however, seems less a microphone attuned to Pythagoras’ celestial harmonies than an encircling by merging corporate airwaves.

As Douglas Kahn discusses in Noise Water Meat, “The most important single achievement in the early history of avant-garde noise was the Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo’s art of noises.” Russolo’s achievement, including his manifesto in 1913 and book in 1916, would come to be synonymous with noise itself, an expression of the motorized machines of modernity. The manifesto closes with a deferential open letter to Futurist composer Francesco Balilla Pratella, whose own Manifesto of Futurist Music was published three years before, where Russolo writes, “The orchestra of the noises of war swelling under a held note of silence in the high sky round golden balloon that observes the firing.” War noises were valued by Russolo because they were the newest sounds and required new means of expression, but also because he valued war.

Interest in Russolo’s project was revived around the musique concrète movement of the 1950s, and today is widely acknowledged as an influence on many later experimental composers and sound artists. Musique concrète’s founder, Pierre Schaeffer, named the movement to distinguish it from musique abstraite, the traditional notation of a musical score to be played later. In his experiments, Schaeffer was able to isolate the natural (concrete) sounds he recorded and then replay them in a musical context once he discovered that the needle on a phonograph could run in a locked groove rather than spiraling toward the center, thereby creating a loop. That the noises could be recorded directly, and then set into a mechanized process to determine their score, approached a purity of idea not yet annealed by the Futurists. Magnetic tape soon replaced the record as the technical standard, and Schaeffer’s subsequent forays into tape loop composition had reverberations as intense as any of Russolo’s cannons in the development of both music and art in the second half of the 20th century.

In the US, early tape experiments led to composer Steve Reich’s breakthrough pieces such as It’s Gonna Rain (1965) and Come Out (1966), where identical phrases are recorded on two channels, first in unison, then with one channel beginning to move ahead. The artifact of an unanticipated discrepancy between two supposedly identical tape machines Reich had been trying to synch in his studio, the controlled moving of a rhythmic pattern out of phase with itself made Reich’s compositional process audible to the listener—an awareness that developed gradually with each repetition. The cultural significance of the loop as a tool of analysis had already been ingrained in the mass media several years before with the endless television replay of the Zapruder film in an attempt to reconstruct the composition of Kennedy’s assassination. The smoking gun was shot offscreen; and if it couldn’t be seen, perhaps, the media’s obsessive repetition of the scene suggested, it could be heard—if only one could listen hard enough. Nearly a decade later, the surveillance industry and the media had comfortably infiltrated each other, and the right speakers were in place to broadcast clandestine and condemning offscreen sounds to the nation with the Watergate tapes: a coverup of mindblowing proportions was revealed sonically, as the nation listened to the official story gradually moving out of synch with itself.

Today’s Bose noise-neutralizing headphones would likely preclude late-night conversations with Deep Throat in a public setting, especially since his information was coded in what he didn’t say. The critical voice of the information age claims to know what sources are worthy to listen to, and which to tune out. It’s the charge of many of the current artists working in sound and space to renegotiate that relationship in terms of the listener, not the consumer. Contemporary sound artists such as Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, whose ingenious use of binaural headphones and speakers whisper unwanted information or unnecessary comments directly into the listener’s ear, gently remind us of our position as bodies and of our body’s position in space, both of which are essential to the experience of listening. The mutterings aren’t important for what they say, not even for what they don’t say. The space-filling and soul-nourishing properties of sound are not about volume or information. The machinations of the cosmos being imagined around New York City this spring are about experiencing fullness and resonance, filling a real space with waves that don’t be need to be named so they might be more meaningfully felt.

Lucy Raven is a Brooklyn-based painter and the associate editor of BOMB. She is cofounder and coeditor of The Relay Project, a new audiomagazine.