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Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art

Sep 12, 20246 min read

Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art

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Abstract

Listening to Noise and Silence engages with the emerging practice of sound art and the concurrent development of a discourse and theory of sound. In this original and challenging work, Salomé Voegelin immerses the reader in concepts of listening to sound artwork and the everyday acoustic environment, establishing an aesthetics and philosophy of sound and promoting the notion of a sonic sensibility. A multitude of sound works are discussed, by lesser known contemporary artists and composers (for example Curgenven, Gasson and Federer), historical figures in the field (Artaud, Feldman and Cage), and that of contemporary canonic artists such as Janet Cardiff, Bill Fontana, Bernard Parmegiani, and Merzbow. Informed by the ideas of Adorno, Merleau-Ponty and others, the book aims to come to a critique of sound art from its soundings rather than in relation to abstracted themes and pre-existing categories. Listening to Noise and Silence broadens the discussion surrounding sound art and opens up the field for others to follow.

Notes

Listening

Go to annotation“This chapter explores listening, not as a physiological fact but as an act of engaging with the world.” (Voegelin, 2010, p. 10)

Notes

  • the senses make us and enable access to the world, although filtered
  • listening is interpretation, not knowing. it’s unsharp and highly personal

Go to annotation“This first chapter describes listening as an activity, an interactivity, that produces and invents and demands of the listener a complicity and commitment that rethinks existing philosophies of perception.” (Voegelin, 2010, p. 11)

  • philosophy of sound art: subjectivity, objectivity, communication, collective relations, meaning and sense making
  • what exactly makes this difference of hearing to reading a text in terms? (Voegelin, 2010, p. 13)
  • Go to annotation“What I hear in Merleau-Ponty’s Causeries is not the body of the text but the body of Merleau-Ponty, whose complex unity, contingent, fragmented and doubtful, meets me in my listening.” (Voegelin, 2010, p. 13)
  • Go to annotation“It is not vision that painting and philosophy has liberated from representation; it is sonic perception, which is free of the visual stranglehold on knowledge and experience.” (Voegelin, 2010, p. 14)
  • This directness of sound makes it free from the process of over-intellectualization
  • Go to annotation“Listening as a critical motility practises Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology as a process of doubt: the critical listener himself is full of doubt about the heard, and doubtful in his complicity he needs to hear and hear again, to know himself as an intersubjective being in a sonic life-world.” (Voegelin, 2010, p. 14)
  • Listening is accepting and knowing uncertainity
  • Sound is always present, rendering the world full of life

Go to annotation“When we start to listen as a critical motility this position becomes untenable. Listening emancipated from the expectation to enhance does something else. It produces, it invents, it generates. It demands that the heard be more than a ghost of the visual, a flimsy figment of the imagination, soon dispelled. However, instead of denying the ephemeral quality of its object, it is the preference for the assumed substance of visuality that needs to be reassessed by focusing on the ephemeral exactly.” (Voegelin, 2010, p. 15)

  • sounds brings together the subjective and objective: Go to annotation“in the experience of our own generative perception we produce the objectivity from our subjective and particular position of listening, which in its turn is constituted by the objectivity of the object as a prior moment of hearing, subjective and particular.” (Voegelin, 2010, p. 16)
  • the sonic subject as without form, outside the social exchange sounds like a difficult position
  • I skipped the Heidegger part…
  • Go to annotation“On the Machair produces sense as a sonic knowing, complex, sticky and involved.” (Voegelin, 2010, p. 20)
  • Go to annotation“I would be very hard pressed to tell you an exact knowledge gained, but I could discuss a sense of knowing about myself in relation to the sonic material and the time and place produced in my listening.” (Voegelin, 2010, p. 20)
  • Sound enables the subjective imagination of things
  • Go to annotation“Signifying is a solitary practice, which does not function communicatively.” (Voegelin, 2010, p. 24)
  • Go to annotation“acoustic ecology, an environment heard” (Voegelin, 2010, p. 24)

Go to annotation“The issue between the two artists’ work is intention and the notion of the Real and what it is in relation to the environment recorded. Where is a soundscape produced, composing a fictional place between the intentions of the artist and the perception of the listener, and where is the emphasis on an authentic sense of place, for the purpose of preserving endangered sounds and fostering acoustic awareness?” (Voegelin, 2010, p. 25)

Go to annotation“Eyes work well as an ordering-tool: segregating according to differences and aligning references to build meaning within the field of vision. Even in motion the visual focuses on relationships and differences and derives its meaning from them. Images are dialectical, expressing themselves against each other. They are a chain of differences however mobile. The ear, when it operates not in the service of such a visual organization, does not order things but produces its own ephemeral order. Sound can give an indication of left or right, high or low, etc. but this is not the orientation of objects and places but of itself. Sonic listening is not dialectical, it works not on differences and similarities but hears cumulatively: it builds from what ever comes at it in a haphazard way shaky buildings whose design is that of sound rather than of its source. It stacks things against each other indiscriminately, hearing whatever is at hand, and it can do so because it operates in the dark, unseen.” (Voegelin, 2010, p. 26)

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