Discovering the Creative Potential of Audio

The premiere of the John Cage’s 4’33″ was given by David Tudor on August 29, 1952, at Woodstock, New York as part of a recital of contemporary piano music. The piece was composed for any instrument, or any combination of instruments. The score instructs the performers to remain silent during each of its three movements. “Tacet”. The experience of hearing the piece changes according to where it is performed, or recorded. The audience at its premiere reacted variously, some whispering to one another, some walking out. Rather than silence, the audience heard perhaps for the first time the sound of their environment, and the sound of themselves interacting with their environment.

The features of the sound world we inhabit have attracted more and more attention from artists and composers since the beginning of the 20th century. As new technologies, materials and activities become a part of our day to day existence, so the sound world changes. The project of Sound Art originally was to remark on these changes in our acoustic environment.

In 1913, the Italian futurist painter Luigi Russolo set out a manifesto for distinguishing the “inviolatable and sacred” world of music from the unpredictable world of sound in his treatise “The Art of Noises”. He called for artists to observe the noise of industry in their works, in the same way that his contemporaries were observing new modes of travel and warfare in their visual pieces.

Since then, Sound Art has begun not only to observe the acoustic environment, but to manipulate it.

Janet Cardiff’s 2001 work ‘Forty Part Motet’ is a recording of Thomas Tallis’ ‘Spem in Alium Nunquam Habui’ which is played back employing an individual loudspeaker for each voice.

The speakers are arranged in the round, and listeners are invited to climb inside the music. They can move between voices during the performance, favoring bass over tenor for example. They also hear the sound of the choir preparing, they catch fragments of the live audience’s discussions and movements as they enter the auditorium.

The experience is completely immersive.

Cathy de Monchaux's 'Sweetly The Air Flew Overhead, Battle no 4', which featured sound from Martyn Ware

“Our sensitivity to sound as human beings is immense, and like smell, it affects us powerfully.” The unconcious processing attributed by our brains to processing extremely important survival-influencing data has inevitably atrophied over the millenia, but how much of this latent power yet remains to be revealed?

In the Lab over the coming months we are going to be exploring why the experience of our sound world is so important, how and why it is going to change, and which technologies are driving these changes.

Through a series of interviews in audio and video, my blog entries, and these pieces I will be looking at both avant-garde and everyday ways in which sound can affect our lives. This month I talk to Cathy de Monchaux and Charlie Morrow about the part sound has played in their work.

Cathy de Monchaux is a sculptor living and working in London. Her sculptures frequently use materials such as glass, paper, metal and leather. Since 1988 she has shown internationally, frequently in America, and her work is part of public collections in the Tate Gallery London, the Hirshorn Museum Washington, and Albright Knox New York, amongst others.

On the podcast I discuss a project we collaborated on together with Vince Clarke at her home in Hoxton – you can hear some of the sounds that we used to accompany her sculptures in the Podcast.

Charlie Morrow, pictured here interacting with a heartbeat sensing machine.

Charlie Morrow is a conceptualist living and working in Chelsea, New York. He has been instrumental in developing the manipulation of sound for public spaces, events, commercial soundtracks and museum installations.

Charlie and I discuss how he came to work with sound, and how his work with sound will change in the future.