About Sound Arts

In the first session, Jose asked us to think about what sound art is. After reading Alan Licht’s article, I had a few thoughts on the subject. There is a quote at the end of the article that I found interesting, and it comes from sound artist Steve Roden. ‘sound is not a medium that developed through a clean linear trajectory and Ended as a real movement like Futurism or even Fluxus, it’s a messy history that includes a lot of wonderful things. Development for most of us was piecemeal and personal, not as a group evolving together.’ 

It seems to me that the art of sound includes a lot of things, and as Steve says, the development of sound is not a linear one. Sound is active in different areas at the same time, such as sound exhibitions and installations, sound ecologies, electronic sound, film and game sound, music, experimental sound. Everyone who is interested in sound is trying to explore more possibilities of sound in their own familiar territory or in unknown territories.

In fact, I am still unable to define sound art clearly. I think that all works related to sound, be it radio drama, film and game sound, sound installations, sound architecture, etc. They all can be considered as sound art. Sound art is the use of sound to express personal emotion and ideas or to create meaning (social meaning or meaningful to any other field) and beauty with sound. That’s my current understanding and I’m not sure it’s right.