This article provides an overview of sound art, encompassing its history and artistic development, and the complexities of the term’s use as a categorisation. It starts with various definitions employed and the ways that recent museum exhibitions have left the genre’s parameters seemingly open-ended, as well as the problems to be faced in finding a ‘frame’ for sound in an exhibition setting. The article then lays out the roots of the form’s aesthetics, including the disjunction between sound and image afforded by the invention of recording, musique concrète, and spatialised composition through the centuries. Sound art’s relationships to the 60s art movement Earthworks, ambient music, sound by visual artists, architecture, sound sculpture, surveillance, sound design and sound ecology are explored to contextualise its significance not only to different disciplines within the arts to but sound’s place in contemporary society. At the conclusion, two recent works by D.A.M.A.G.E. and David Byrne, which loom somewhere in-between music and sound art, are considered in light of the increasingly fluid interpretation of sound art’s identity.

The article is a study on the literature of sound art from two languange areas, German and English. The text reveals two different discourses. The German texts on Klangkunst (sound art in German) focus upon the sound material’s relation to a spatial location where sound sculptures and installations are given central focus. These are genres that transcend the old divisions between spatial arts (Raumkunst) and the time-based arts (Zeitkunst). A strong emphasis on the dual aspect of seeing and hearing could be described as a central point of departure. Klangkunst concerns an investigation of both time and space, through ear and eye. In the English literature on sound art, there are often references to sound’s inner aesthetical qualities. The perspectives on sound’s relation to room is evident also here, but the perspectives are however broader, in the sense that the aspects of space and locality are diversified and pluralistic. One will find an even larger scope of literature and references if the area of sound art also includes cultural-studies perspectives on sound, sonic experiences and acoustic phenomena, the influx of new technologies on the everyday soundscape, and sound design. These are areas often referred to when speaking about the ‘sonic turn’. The way the term sound art is handled in English texts is often very vague. The German study of Klangkunst developed within the academic field of musicology. There has been a fruitful collaboration between musicologists, publishing houses, music journals, galleries, academic institutions and higher art education, which together has helped to establish Klangkunst as an artistic expression and theoretical discourse. This strong intellectual infrastructure has been important in the ‘construction’ of the concept Klangkunst. The two separate theoretical discourses not only deal with the concept of sound art differently. Although many of the artists are dealt with in both the English and the German literature, there are very seldom references to the German literature in the English texts. This tendency is not reciprocal.

This essay develops an ontology of sound and argues that sound art plays a crucial role in revealing this ontology. I argue for a conception of sound as a continuous, anonymous flux to which human expressions contribute but which precedes and exceeds these expressions. Developing Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s conception of the perceptual unconscious, I propose that this sonic flux is composed of two dimensions: a virtual dimension that I term ‘noise’ and an actual dimension that consists of contractions of this virtual continuum: for example, music and speech. Examining work by Max Neuhaus, Chris Kubick, Francisco Lopez and others, I suggest that the richest works of sound art help to disclose the virtual dimension of sound and its process of actualisation.

This paper addresses some aspects related to the use of sound to create referential and representational discourses in sound art. We concentrate on the particular use of sound in this repertoire whose delimitation is still increasing among practitioners. As a relatively new art genre it oscillates between aesthetical and organisational strategies that are commonly found in the domain of both music and visual arts. At the same time, it resists being fully incorporated by these two domains as it develops a discourse that is very specific to its own. To analyse these relations we focus on two fundamental aspects for the study of sound art: space and time. The sound art repertoire approaches these two aspects in a very particular way, placing them at the core of its creative process and establishing connections with conceptual and referential aspects that are put in evidence by sound. We will concentrate on two different points of view: on one side, we analyse how sounds can build temporal discourses that become attached to specific spaces; on the other side, we consider the use of a space that emerges from contextual connections triggered by sounds.

The commercially available field recordings of Francisco López and Toshiya Tsunoda are difficult to classify. These field recordings are not site specific in the conventional sense because they are not tied to a particular architectural or listening space. Nor can field recordings be categorised as just another subgenre of experimental electronic music. Whereas in musique concrète and acousmatic music, sounds are organised according to musical or thematic parameters, López’s and Tsunoda’s field recording sounds are subjected to minimal editing and processing, and are organised according to the innate traits of the sounds themselves.

It would be insufficient, however, to offer the usual conciliatory conclusion that López’s and Tsunoda’s recordings straddle the sound art/music divide by possessing qualities of both. This article argues that these field recordings can best be understood in relation to the visual arts concept of objecthood, Michael Fried’s term for deciphering minimalist sculpture of the late 1960s. Objecthood explains how these field recordings use appropriated sounds that are nonetheless treated as non-referential, autonomous materials. This strategy posits its own type of site specificity that purports to be acultural and ahistorical, yet is nevertheless steeped in culture and history.

Urban Portrait: Thessaloniki is a sonic art installation by this author, presented at the Lansdown Centre for Electronic Arts of Middlesex University, London, in May 2008. This article constitutes an exploration of sonic representation of the experience of place as a central element of the work. The term psychosonography is introduced to encapsulate the described method and references to its supporting concepts. Urban Portrait is about representation of experienced locality, as well as the emergence of relationships among a collection of such localities through their sonic embodiments. Ultimately, it takes the form of the sonic equivalent of a psychogeographical map, to be navigated by aural means.

The article tries to explain different aspects of sound art in public space in the context of an understanding of a modified language of twentieth-century visual art and music. It gives a description of different approaches to colouring situations and contexts with sound. Various examples of sonification and artistic treatments in our surrounding are shown. It shows an artistic practice which is linked to social-cultural aspects and their critical role in art. Therefore sound installations are placed into a genealogy of installation practice in public space.

The use of sound for representation and narrative may go beyond what we might conventionally term musical. Film has gradually brought into focus the practice of sound art as something distinct from music yet existing at the end of a unified continuum between abstraction and representation. Music has gradually been subsumed into the soundtrack as another element of the film sound world, and sound design is often on an equal footing with it. Sound designers are now increasingly exploring the more psychological (as opposed to merely representational) dimensions of sound.

This article introduces the recent sound works of Heidi Fast, a Finnish voice and performance artist. Fast’s creative practice operates between art and philosophy, and articulates several ‘zones of becoming’: what Fast designates as ‘the clinical’, ‘the virtual’ and ‘vocal thought-material’. Using a methodology of routing, the article shows how these zones emerge as aesthetic, ethical and political concerns within Fast’s work.

Since 2005, Fast’s sound works have variously taken shape as miniature concerts, social sculptures, imaginary soundscapes and environmental music performances. Drawing upon the writings of theorists who have helped shape her practice, this article argues that Fast uses sound and voice to propose an ‘actualising philosophy’. This philosophy actualises virtualities (unrealised potentials), affecting transformative shifts through tiny mutations in perceptions and behaviours.

The following discusses the potential of soundscape work to reveal new aspects of our everyday aural environments. Openness to the voice(s) of one’s sonic surroundings is maintained as a hallmark of soundscape works, and also a key component of sound art more generally. Different perspectives and questions are articulated, with a consistent focus on the variety of spaces engaged by both sound(scape) artists and listeners. A case study is presented – a recently initiated sound art project on the part of the author entitled The Icebreaker. The latter is a musical instrument, performance piece and interactive installation made from piezo microphones and ice. Prepared compositions, including soundscape works, are diffused at different moments when one ‘plays’ The Icebreaker. I describe this emergent work as an example of the sort of considerations and negotiations that are at the heart of soundscape/sound art composition. My aim is to demonstrate how sound artworks bring us to attend to sounds we formerly failed to notice, revealing our own reactions to these stimuli at the same time.

Strategically placed with the right degree of persistence and ‘sympathetic vibration’, sound can reveal itself as a potentially devastating force. As used against the Branch Davidian religious sect in 1993 at Waco Texas, the FBI’s little remembered ‘sonic assault’ – involving Tibetan monks in prayer, dentist drills, and other bizarre recordings – arguably contributed to the tragic denouement of events as they were witnessed live on TV by millions around the world. The use of sustained, high-pitched, loud or repetitive noises and music added to an already incendiary narrative endgame, established first by the sect but later supported by the media. This essay draws on this tragic event, and later ‘forensic’ research conducted by the author in the process of writing, scoring and producing an audio performance work, Cantata of Fire. Specifically, it explores the way in which amplified ‘concrete’ sound and electronic ‘viral’ voices were used as a weapon at Waco – materially, psychologically, theatrically and ‘diegetically’. And in the context of a much longer (and repressed) history of sound as used in ‘theatres of war’ and other conflicts, the author reconsiders the overlooked and underestimated powers of sound, music and noise in an age dominated by digital ‘real-time’ electronic media and ‘tele-visual’ surveillance.

During the mid twentieth century, space was developed as a composable dimension. Composers used the three spatial dimensions in their own fashion, but space was understood primarily as an abstract concept. It was not until the development of sound installation art that space was discovered in a concrete manner, explored, performed in and could even acquire its own specificity, called site-sound (Ortsklang).

The article shows consequences and strategies of site-sound installations in three sections – from spatial sound to site-sound, public space as performance venue, and public strategies (acoustic interventions, interactive installations and participatory projects) – with three examples of site-sound installations (Site-Sound Marl Mitte, meta.stases and towersounds.2: watch tower).

Acoustic art in public spaces basically involves installing a space in another existing space, both physically and sensorially, and metaphysically and mentally – an interior space in an exterior space, so to speak. The original quality of sound art lies in the oscillation of interior and exterior space. Thus public spaces intensified by sound art cause transitional spaces to come into being, in a political and a psychoanalytic sense.