In the Blink of an Ear
Toward a Non-Cochlear Sonic Art
by Seth Kim-Cohen
Continuum
Continuum
"Polemical, revisionist, prescriptive: In The Blink of an Ear argues for a reassessment of the short history of sound art, rejecting the tendency toward sound-in-itself in favour of a reading of sound’s expanded situation and its uncontainable textuality.
It has been nearly a century since Marcel Duchamp famously proposed a ‘non-retinal’ visual art, rejecting judgments of taste and beauty. In The Blink of an Ear asks why the sonic arts did not experience a parallel turn toward a non-cochlear sonic art, imagined as both a response and a complement to Duchamp’s conceptualism. Rather than treat sound art as an artistic practice unto itself, or as the unwanted child of music, In The Blink of an Ear relates the post-War sonic arts to contemporaneous movements in the gallery arts.
Key ideas from art history, poststructuralism and deconstruction are leveraged to suggest that the sonic arts have been subject to the same cultural pressures that have shaped the most important post-war movements in the gallery arts: Minimalism, conceptualism, appropriation and relational aesthetics. Sonic practice and theory have downplayed – or, in many cases, completely rejected – the de-formalization of the artwork and its simultaneous animation in the conceptual realm. John Cage and Pierre Schaeffer’s predilection for sound-in-itself fuses Greenbergian media-specificity with a phenomenological emphasis on perception, and this tendency has established itself as the dominant paradigm for the production and reception of sound art. In The Blink of an Ear dismantles this history, excavating the conceptual implications of important instances of the sonic arts of the past six decades, and establishing the principles for contemporary non-cochlear sonic practice.
Embracing the inevitable interaction of sound with the social, the linguistic, the philosophical, the political and the technological, In The Blink of an Ear announces a turning point in the theorization of the sonic arts. "
1 comment:
R. J. Morey,
inventor of jigsaw music.
A totally new and innovative way of composing, creating and listening to music.
R.J. creates digital electronic ambient binaural frequencial sound pieces. He then listens to a piece whilst composing a companion piece ad infinitum.
The result, a series of soundscapes that ineract with each other in multi frequencies.
Then CDs are created and different soundscapes played on two or more hi fi systems with anything up to 8 systems with 16 speakers, all playing different soundscapes at any random point. The result a combination of possibly millions of random interactions that create different coherent soundscapes.
Try it yourself in a limited fashion on his website http://www.thegewgawsiangallery.co.uk
here you can find menus of soundscape pieces. Try it yourself and set one playing, wait as long as you want and set another playing, then another and another an another, stop and start them anywhere and hear the result.
Of course online you can only hear it through two speakers, but if you want to experiment with the real thing, get in touch and you will be given a link where you can download enough pieces for several cs, and then play them on several hi fi systems simultaneously, you will enjoy this totally new way of listening.
Post a Comment