Art of Sound

1988

2017

JUNE 1-4, 2016 AARHUS UNIVERSITY, DENMARK The current art field is full of sound: audible and inaudible, infrasound, ultrasound, sound machines, sound installations, field recordings, digital sounds, biological sounds, sound walks, sounds from instruments, voices, nature, sonifications of data and so on. Sound art comprises a wide range of different artistic practices in which sound is a central element. It occurs in a variety of formats and contexts, crossing conventional boundaries between art genres and institutions. Despite this abundance of sonic expressions, sound art is still, as Christoph Cox noted in 2011, ‘profoundly undertheorized’.

Subjectively reporting back on Day 2 of the 'Ephemeral Sustainability Conference' at the EKKO Festival, Bergen, 2012.

Resonance, 2020

In the 1990s, thanks to digital convergence, many disciplines centrally concerned with the mediated uses of sound from a variety of different orientations—communication, musicology, speech, ethnography, history of technology, journalism, theater and drama, and art, to name a few—began to recognize the need for a new term to indicate their shared focus. Here I propose soundwork as that term, laying out the reasons why we need it, how it can change our thinking across a broad range of cultural forms, the kind of cultural and political work it can perform, and how linking sound to our understanding of lived experience changes the way that we perceive the world around us.

Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, 2013

How do we hear? Why do we listen? From religious chant to village bells to elevator muzak to noise pollution, sound has played a major role in human cultures and human experience since time immemorial. In this course, students will approach and engage critically with sound, listening, hearing, and aurality as categories of analysis. In addition to weekly readings, students will be asked to write papers, partake in listening/sound exercises, and confect creative projects that engage with the themes of the class.

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.

Creativity and Educational Innovation Review, 2021