28.3.06

 

Text Sound Art : A Survey


Richard Kostelanetz


The art is text-sound, as distinct from text-print and text-seen, which is to say that texts must be sounded and thus heard to be "read," in contrast to those that must be printed and thus be seen. The art is text-sound, rather than sound-text, to acknowledge the initial presence of a text, which is subject to aural enhancements more typical of music. To be precise, it is by non-melodic auditory structures that language or verbal sounds are poetically charged with meanings or resonances they would not otherwise have. The most appropriate generic term for the initial materials would be "vocables," which my dictionary defines as "a word regarded as a unit of sounds or letters rather than as a unit of meaning." As text-sound is an intermedium located between language arts and musical arts, its creators include artists who initially established themselves as "writers," "poets," "composers," and "painters" in their text-sound works, they are, of course, functioning as text-sound artists. Many do word-image art (or "visual poetry") as well, out of a commitment to exploring possibilities in literary intermedia.

The term "text-sound" characterizes language whose principal means of coherence is sound, rather than syntax or semantics - where the sounds made by comprehensible words create their own coherence apart from denotative meanings A simple example would be this "tongue- twister" familiar from childhood:

If a Hottentot taught a Hottentot tot to talk 'ere the tot could totter, ought the Hottentot to be taught to say ought or naught or what ought to be taught 'er?

The subject of this ditty is clearly neither Hottentots nor pedagogy but the related sounds of "or' and "ought," and what holds this series of words together is not the thought or the syntax but those two repeated sounds. It is those sounds that one primarily remembers after hearing this sentence read aloud. As in other text-sound art, this language is customarily recited in a voice that speaks, rather than sings. Thus, the vocal pitches are non-specific.

The first exclusionary distinction then is that words that have intentional pitches, or melodies, are not text-sound art but song. To put it differently, text-sound art may include recognizable words or phonetic fragments, but once musical pitches are introduced, or musical instruments are added (and once words are tailored to a pre-existing melody or rhythm), the results are music and are experienced as such. Secondly, text-sound art differs from "oral poetry," which is syntactically standard language written to be read aloud. These exclusions give the art a purist definition, I admit, but without these distinctions, there is no sure way of separating text-sound art, the true intermedium, from music on the one side and poetry on the other.

http://www.ubu.com/papers/kostelanetz.html

 

Soundings

Suzanne Delehanty

At the beginning of this century, sounds began to reverberate through the once silent and timeless world of the plastic arts. It was as if musical instruments, hushed for centuries behind the window of Renaissance art, suddenly stirred and resounded. How could it be otherwise? The melodies of Edison's phonograph, the roar of the automobile, the wireless wonder of Marconi, the smashing of the atom, and Einstein's theory of relativity had ushered in a new age. Artists, always the first to perceive the essential changes in the world around us, set out to give form to the spirit of the new era. For some, the utopian possibilities of technology and the machine became a primary source of inspiration. For others, imbued with the idealism of the nineteenth-century Romantics and Symbolists, the dream of an integration of all the arts offered refuge and salvation from the looming edifice of science and technology. This dream emerged from its slumber beneath the rational materialism of the last century to shatter the Renaissance concept of art as a silent and timeless mirror of nature and to release an art that is an equivalent of reality, a separate realm.

Sound, gathered from the space around us by our skin and bones, as well by as by our ears, is inextricably bound to both our perception and experience. Human thought is manifested in word and speech, while emotions such as joy and sadness are expressed in song and lament. The sound of sea, wind, and rain never cease to renew our awe of nature. Ambient sound, or the sound that surrounds us, gives us a sense of our proper bodily location in space. Noise, random, or unwanted sound often alerts us to impending events and to danger or else merely jangles our nerves. By contrast, sound ordered by the human mind-and exceptionally by chance-is music, a celebrated human accomplishment. The absence Of Sound is silence, the unknown; inaudible voices have always been metaphors for the visions of mystics and for revelations about an invisible world beyond our ken.

Sound, both heard and unheard, offered the first Modernists at the opening of the century a means to present their revolutionary ideas about the nature of the work of art, the artist, and the spectator. During the nineteenth century, the views of the Renaissance were transformed by the Romantics and the Symbolists, who came to doubt the truth of pure sensory perception. For them, art was not a study of nature, as the Realists and Impressionists maintained. Rather, art was the creative power of the word, the logos, out of which all things were made in the beginning; it was the power to create, borne out of inspired originality. In 1859 in The Mirror of Art Charles Baudelaire, the last Romantic poet and the first Modernist, declared:

It is Imagination that first taught man the moral meaning of color, of contour, of sound, and of scent. In the beginning of the world it created analogy and metaphor.

With Baudelaire the work of art shifted from the world of Renaissance illusion, or the factual description of objective reality to a new and third realm that mediated between the outer world of phenomena and the inner world of the spirit. Through the "magical operation" of the imagination, in Baudelaire's view, artists became creators who could stir new responses in the beholder. Artists were no longer merely skillful delineators of the visible world, they were now the creators of, and guides to, a completely new realm. This mystical role of the artist was echoed by the Dadaist Hugo Ball in his diaries written between 1910 and 1921: "When we said Kandinsky and Picasso, we meant not painters, but priests; not craftsmen, but creators of new worlds and new paradises."

http://www.ubu.com/papers/delehanty.html


 

CUT AND PASTE: COLLAGE AND THE ART OF SOUND


Kevin Concannon

from Sound by Artists (Art Metropole and Walter Phillips Gallery, 1990)
Though ill-considered as an artistic medium, sound recordings have been produced by visual artists within a variety of contexts since the beginning of the twentieth century and are numerous. Artists and individual works discussed in the following pages have been selected with an ear toward their individual merits, as representative of more general formal and aesthetic currents and for their significance within the broader context of twentieth century art and popular culture.

Taking off from Walter Benjamin's assessment of gramophone records as enabling 'the original to meet the beholder halfway.' 1 I have traced my way to the contradictory notion of the recording as the 'original,' ill-suited for live 'reproduction,' through the application of an essentially formalist, and ultimately photographic, critical apparatus.

The very idea of an Audio Art implies a genre defined foremost by formalist concerns. The recordings discussed cover a broad spectrum, including poetry, music, text and drama. The foundation upon which my arguments for sound recordings as works of art are based, is the popular understanding of mechanically reproduced media as accurate transcriptions of reality. Both photography and sound recording developed, not within the fine arts community, but rather within popular culture. Their substantial popular histories are inextricably linked to their capacity to 'capture' that specific time and place and to transform it into a piece of documentary evidence, whether it be Matthew Brady's Civil War or RCA's Caruso concert.

http://www.ubu.com/papers/concannon.html

 

Sound Poetry - A Survey

Steve McCaffery

Introduction

The 1950s saw the development of what might be termed a third phase in sound poetry. Prior to this time, in a period roughly stretching from 1875 to 1928, sound poetry's second phase had manifested itself in several diverse and revolutionary investigations into language's non-semantic, acoustic properties. In the work of the Russian Futurists Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh, the intermedia activities of Kandinsky the bruitist poems of the Dadaists (Ball, Schwitters, Arp, Hausmann, Tzara) and the 'paroles in liberta' of the Italian Futurist Marinetti, the phonernatic aspect of language became finally isolated and explored for its own sake. Prior to this there had been isolated pioneering attempts by several writers including Christian Morgenstern (ca. 1875), Lewis Carroll ('Jabberwocky'), August Stramm (ca. 1912), Petrus Borel (ca. 1820), Moliere, the Silesian mystic Quirinus Khulman (1 7th century), Rabelais and Aristophanes. The second phase is convincing proof of the continuous presence of a sound poetry throughout the history of western literature. The first phase, perhaps better-termed, the first area of sound poetry, is the vast, intractible area of archaic and primitive poetries, the many instances of chant structures and incantation, of nonsense syllabic mouthings and deliberate lexical distortions still alive among North American, African, Asian and Oceanic peoples.

http://www.ubu.com/papers/mccaffery.html


 

The Aesthetics of Noise

Torben Sangild
Noise can blow your head out. Noise is rage. Noise is ecstatic. Noise is psychedelic. Noise is often on the edge between annoyance and bliss. Noises are many things. Noise is a difficult concept to deal with.
Some would say that it is no longer meaningful to talk about noise as something special, since we have finally reached a state in which all sounds are equal. That may be so for certain avant-garde artists and advanced listeners, but I will assert that we still hear a difference between noise and more traditional musical sounds. Noises are the sounds which used to be denounced as non-musical. To include noise in music thus still has an effect and bears a certain aesthetic power. That power is the topic of this essay.

http://www.ubu.com/papers/noise.html



 

The Art of Noises

Luigi Russolo

Ancient life was all silence. In the nineteenth century, with the invention of the machine, Noise was born. Today, Noise triumphs and reigns supreme over the sensibility of men. For many centuries life went by in silence, or at most in muted tones. The strongest noises which interrupted this silence were not intense or prolonged or varied. If we overlook such exceptional movements as earthquakes, hurricanes, storms, avalanches and waterfalls, nature is silent.

Amidst this dearth of noises, the first sounds that man drew from a pieced reed or streched string were regarded with amazement as new and marvelous things. Primitive races attributed sound to the gods; it was considered sacred and reserved for priests, who used it to enrich the mystery of their rites.

And so was born the concept of sound as a thing in itself, distinct and independent of life, and the result was music, a fantastic world superimposed on the real one, an inviolatable and sacred world. It is easy to understand how such a concept of music resulted inevitable in the hindering of its progress by comparison with the other arts. The Greeks themselves, with their musical theories calculated mathematically by Pythagoras and according to which only a few consonant intervals could be used, limited the field of music considerably, rendering harmony, of which they were unaware, impossible.

http://www.ubu.com/papers/russolo.html

 

The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin


William S. Burroughs

Shakespeare Rimbaud live in their words. Cut the word lines and you will hear their voices. Cut-ups often come through as code messages with special meaning for the cutter. Table tapping? Perhaps. Certainly an improvement on the usual deplorable performance of contacted poets through a medium. Rimbaud announces himself, to be followed by some excruciatingly bad poetry. Cutting Rimbaud and you are assured of good poetry at least if not personal appearance.

All writing is in fact cut-ups. A collage of words read heard overhead. What else? Use of scissors renders the process explicit and subject to extension and variation. Clear classical prose can be composed entirely of rearranged cut-ups. Cutting and rearranging a page of written words introduces a new dimension into writing enabling the writer to turn images in cinematic variation. Images shift sense under the scissors smell images to sound sight to sound sound to kinesthetic. This is where Rimbaud was going with his color of vowels. And his ìsystematic derangement of the senses.î The place of mescaline hallucination: seeing colors tasting sounds smelling forms.

http://www.ubu.com/papers/burroughs_gysin.html

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