Listen – it’s the sound of a new art
(Filed: 15/06/2005)

It used to be visual art’s poor cousin, but now sonic sculpture is creating a buzz, says Serena Davies

American sound artist Bill Fontana has been recording the Millennium Bridge across the Thames outside Tate Modern. “Shall I show it to you?” he says. He means the recording, not the bridge. “The structure’s really musical. You can’t hear it with your ears but if you use accelerometers, which are what structural engineers use to measure vibration, there’s a very interesting sound developing.”

Enter the weird world of sound art. As in King Lear when the blinded Gloucester learns to “see feelingly”, so sound artists, with the help of a little technological wizardry, teach us to see aurally. It’s a melding of the senses, an opening of Blake’s doors of perception.

For decades, only the perceptions of an esoteric group of innovators and their friends have been getting any wider. “For a long time, sound was the poorer cousin of the other mediums. It’s taken a long time for the art establishment to accept it,” says Lina Dzuverovic-Russell, UK-based sound-art curator and writer. Fontana calls his craft “the ugly duckling” of the art world.

Yet all this is changing fast. Sound art is moving into the mainstream. In Britain, it can be heard in our most celebrated buildings and, as most sound artists started off as musicians, it is making a noise in the music arena, too.

Five years ago, when the Hayward Gallery held the UK’s first major group show on sound art, Sonic Boom, “it was really a very big step”, according to its curator, musician and critic David Toop. “There was still some anxiety about whether it would mean anything to people – but they really enjoyed it. Now, you read about these pieces one after another.”

These pieces include, most famously, Bruce Nauman’s recent installation of eerie, cacophonous voices in Britain’s biggest art space, Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. There is also sound-art collective Greyworld’s touch-activated whispers and bird song at the Hampton Court Maze (recently opened) and an enormous project by the NVA group to create “soundscapes” on the Isle of Skye, launching in August. There have been further big exhibitions, at the V & A (last year’s sound installation, Shhh) and the Barbican (Christian Marclay, one of the genre’s most respected practitioners, featured recently).

And, long before he started thinking about the Millennium Bridge, San-Francisco based Fontana, a leading sound artist for 30 years, was disorienting MPs by playing the amplified ticks and chimes of Big Ben directly into the Palace of Westminster.

Recently, the musical end of this art form has been whipping up controversy. The New Music Award is a new high-profile prize, organised by the Performing Right Society’s charity, the PRS Foundation. At £50,000 it is the musical equivalent of the Turner or the Booker, with one difference: the winner is given the prize on merit of the idea alone – the money is to see it through.

The shortlisted suggestions are all, essentially, sound art. Some say they’re not music at all. There’s ex-Pogue Jem Finer’s project for a system of Japanese water bowls built into a vast hole in the countryside, where the pings and plunks of dripping water will boom out through a giant brass horn above ground. There’s Terry Mann’s plan to combine the sounds of all the cathedral bells in England into a single surround-sound installation. And there’s Craig Vear’s idea for an installation piece created out of the noises made round a buoy at sea – to be experienced from a point where you can see the buoy, too.

Each proposal is as concerned with its sound’s location as it is with composition; two are site-specific. Such emphasis on context brings to mind 1970s sound-art pioneer Max Neuhaus’s talk of how he aimed to use sound to “transform the ‘space’ into a ‘place’ “. The suggestions also eschew conventional musical instruments, preferring “found” sounds and environmental noise. They will be musical in so far as the sounds are then arranged, but PRS director David Francis admits it’s a “very, very broad definition”.

He says the shortlist’s sound-art theme is incidental: these were simply ideas that demonstrated the most creative thinking. Vear’s explanation is more prosaic: “Fifty thousand pounds doesn’t pay for an orchestra, but it will allow you to develop a piece of software.”

Whatever the reason, it demonstrates that these ideas are now common currency. Toop describes the suggestions as typical of a lot of contemporary work today. Dzuverovic-Russell – who is in the process of preparing a sound-art exhibition at the South London Gallery featuring Kim Gordon, bassist of cult rock band Sonic Youth – says that mixing art and music is now normal: “The boundaries between media are breaking down.”

Also breaking down are the boundaries between audiences. Mann wants his piece heard in shopping malls and railway stations. Toop is organising work by four sound artists to be played outdoors in the city of Cork, this year’s European Capital of Culture. And Fontana launches an installation in Leeds next week, where the gurgles of rushing water from the city’s atmospheric Dark Arches, built over the river, will combine with the noise of trains from the station above to turn historic Dark Neville Street into a real-time sonic experience.

Whether our perceptions will really be altered remains to be seen. But it’s a noble aim. And, in the meantime, the buzz around sound art is growing, going from a whisper to something to shout about – and, finally, the rest of the art world is listening.

Bill Fontana’s ‘Sound Lines’ will be in Dark Neville Street, Leeds, from June 21. ‘Sound Out’ in Cork, Ireland, is from Sept 1 (www.cork2005.ie). ‘The Storr’ on the Isle of Skye begins on Aug 1 (www.nva.org.uk). The New Music Award will be announced on July 12.