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Dead Logics and Worlds: Sound art and sonorous objects

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 July 2015

Martyn Hudson  and
Tim Shaw
Martyn Hudson*
Affiliation:
Culture Lab, Newcastle University, Grand Assembly Rooms, King’s Road, Newcastle upon Tyne, Tyne and Wear NE1 7RU
Tim Shaw
Affiliation:
Culture Lab, Newcastle University, Grand Assembly Rooms, King’s Road, Newcastle upon Tyne, Tyne and Wear NE1 7RU
*
*Email: Martyn.hudson@newcastle.ac.uk
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Abstract

From the early experimentation with specific sounds in musique concrète (Palombini 1999) to the ‘anecdotal’ music of Luc Ferrari (1996) and the ecological sound activism of Hildegard Westerkamp (2002), the collecting, composition and recomposition of sonorous objects has been central to sound practice. Some sound art has privileged a relationship with visual arts and the structuring of objects in curated spaces (Licht 2007), others with the sound worlds beyond the exhibition (Schafer 1994). By examining a specific sound art installation, Sound and Seclusion by Tim Shaw, this article reworks the idea of sonorous objects as artefacts displaying different kinds of representations, knowledges or data. This question of sonorous ‘knowledge-objects’ is particularly important as ‘collected sounds’ become incorporated into compositions away from their, often remote, spatio-temporal origin out there in the landscape. This article raises three areas for discussion. First, what can sonorous objects tell us about the pre-compositional world (Impett 2007)? Second, in what ways can we understand sonorous objects as they are reworked in compositions which re-narrate them? Third, how can we understand sonorous objects as traces and pieces of data as well as aesthetic productions? The article concludes with a case for reworking the very idea of a sonorous object in sound practices as a product of dead logics and dead worlds as it emerges in new ensembles of composition away from its origin.

Type
Articles
Information
Organised Sound , Volume 20 , Special Issue 2: Sound Art and Music, Historical Continuum and Mimetic Fissures , August 2015 , pp. 263 - 272
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2015 

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