It's getting hard to say if it is the visual conducts the sound in the first place or the sound shapes the visual initially, sound is now recognized as a frontier of art practices. Technology is an obvious reason. There are more tools that are easier and less expensive to use these days. And because of that there is more artistic freedom for those innovative minds.
Sound can be explored in many guises. There can be environments where sound shapes a space, and explorations into how sound affects a viewer’s experience. When we talk about the action and content of recordings, we have to think about the places and spaces that generate different types of sound, like those from abandoned buildings in large cities, flying bats at midnight and a food-processing factory in small town. Since there have to be a source of audio, a vibration of sound waves and a medium to transmit the waves to our ears, sound is filled with evidences and traces of the richness of an environment.
Sound is visual too. There is a straight connection between visual imagery and the recognition of a sound in human perception. Each sound gesture links to a central spot, creating a focal point of weight and intensity. Sound artist can go inside into the old-fashioned standing microphone recording process and rethink about the meaning of hearing and recording, also they can explore the most emerging technology inserted with daily activity and talk about how sound or the awareness of a sound can shape our life.
Moreover, the existence and absence can also be played and investigated by examining sound. Sound can be viewed as prove of existence. However, there would be different kinds of psychical and conceptual delay or disconnection between the sound and visual material of a same existence. Think about the work Lowlands, made by the Scottish artist and Turner Prize winner Susan Philipsz. She has taken the score of a symphony composed for 24 instruments by Pavel Haas in 1943 while he was in a Nazi concentration camp, and reimagined it with just one cello and one viola playing their intermittent parts. When placing three speakers under a passing way beneath a bridge, the artist provide no content for the viewer's eyes about the existence of the singer, however the vocal reminds the audience about the physicality of the song, the writer and the performer.
Also, the repetition of sound can change the content of the hearing. When a familiar word been repeated again and again, it can become a foreign, unfamiliar, nonsense sound. In this situation, the true thing-power or the vital materiality of the object inside the word would start to take place. Think about the sound of a particular language, a certain word, a common parse; and how linguistic limitations narrow the people’s awareness of a certain existence, or the meaning of a thingness.
The exhibition of sound art can go beyond the galleries. Just as the technology of photography changed the ways of looking, the displaying tunes and space would also shape the ways and interpretation of a sound. Think about the situation and places of hearing affect the ways of people understand the emotion and meanings of the sound. Like when put bells ringing in a sculpture garden, people would respond to the imagery and feelings of church bells, cat bells, bicycle bells, and the opening bell of the New York Stock Exchange. Together it is possible for them to make up a new assumption about “A Bell for a Meaning”. Therefore the exhibition situation, displaying sites, the already social assumption about the sound's venue can all affect the audience's understanding of the sound. In any gallery space, or an everyday situation, sound is a message sender of a meaning, as well as carrying a message within the format/surface itself.
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