On Sunday, January 16, the Toronto non-profit organization New Adventures in Sound Art was preparing inside of the Wychwood Barns art complex, just off St. Clair West, for a celebration of Art’s Birthday (an event first held in 1963 by French artist Robert Filliou). NAISA founder Darren Copeland played back recordings of seminal sound art pieces, and eight antique turntables were being prepped for an interactive performance by artist Mike Hansen. Hansen occasionally popped on records to test the system, scratching and manipulating them to create weird, warbling tones. Meanwhile, a bus drew to a halt outside on the frozen street. It let out a high-pitched squeal, akin to the noise a whale might make. The sound was slightly shocking and certainly strange, but to open ears, oddly beautiful.
Toronto is a city filled with intriguing sounds, whether produced by artists and performers, or machines and the environment. Altogether, this audio activity constitutes the field of sound art. Local performer Andrew Zukerman may identify sound art as “music that’s too embarrassed, or for some other reason is not able to consider itself music,” but more broadly speaking, sound art is poised somewhere in between experimental music and conceptual art. Everything from field recordings and sound installations, to visual art made about music, and music made by visual artists, can be included.
Due to these very broad parameters, sound art can often be dismissed with pure bewilderment or claims of excessive pretension. However, perhaps thanks to the growth of new media art, sound art has been on the rise, with works now being recognized for their genuine emotional and creative expression.
To understand the small but steady presence of sound art in Toronto, some general background is required. Consensus points to the beginning of sound being seized upon as a medium for artists early in the twentieth century. In 1922, Dada artist Kurt Schwitters unveiled the “Ursonate,” a performed poem devoid of language and structure. Concurrently, Italian Futurist artist Luigi Russolo wrote the manifesto Art of Noises and constructed intonarumari — noise-making machine-acoustic instruments designed to approximate the sounds of explosions, crashes, and creaks.
In the 1950s and ‘60s, sound art and related forms would begin to coalesce. Radio transmitters and audio oscillators fueled startling works of electronic music by composers such as France’s Pierre Schaeffer and Edgar Varèse, and Germany’s Karlheinz Stockhausen. Although the sounds these composers produced would be highly influential for sound art, they were classically trained musicians working in a classical context.
It was the playful Fluxus art movement that brought sound to a more informal realm, through pieces by Nam June Paik (who had cellist Charlotte Moorman play nude with strategically placed televisions) and George Maciunas (who once covered an entire piano in felt). Related to the Fluxus group was the influential composer John Cage, whose silent piece “4’33,” and other works utilizing radios and contact microphones, can be seen as a catalyst for a great deal of sound art. American artists such as La Monte Young, Tony Conrad, and Terry Riley, whose long-form electronic drone music took inspiration from classical Indian forms, all helped shape concepts of continuous listening and sound installations.
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Pushed along by countless innovators, sound art moved through stages of installations, field recordings, and noisy, discombobulated rock bands playing at gallery openings. One pioneer along the way was Toronto’s John Oswald, who in the late 1980’s invented the genre of “plunderphonics,” where he used clearly identifiable samples to create overwhelming sound collages.
However, sound art did not really explode until the advent of faster, cheaper, and better computer technology in the 1990s. With laptops, artists could record, process, and perform with one tool, a convenient change from the precise and time-consuming tape edits of yore. Improved digital technology also allowed for more precise sound systems, opening up greater possibilities for intricate installations.
Digital technology does not automatically guarantee high-quality pieces, but it has remarkably opened up the field, allowing those without the previously required resources to jump in. For example, since the mid-2000s, there have been fast growing sound art scenes in South Korea and China, hosting artists who do everything from recording the sonic scenery of Shanghai junkyards to amplifying the noises of half-dead computer hard drives.
More sedate pieces have also brought sound artists high esteem, including exhibitions in prestigious museums. Canadian artist Janet Cardiff gained widespread acclaim with her 2001 piece “Forty Part Motet,” in which forty speakers broadcast the voice of a different singer from a choral recording of Thomas Tallis’ 1573 piece “Spem in Alium.” In addition to being performed around the world (including New York’s MoMA), the piece has been on display almost continously at the National Gallery in Ottawa.
At the end of 2010, sound art reached a major milestone when Scottish artist Susan Philipsz won the Turner Prize for her piece “Lowlands,” a recording of her singing the traditional Scottish folk ballad “Lowlands Away.” It was originally installed underneath a series of bridges in Glasgow. The Turner Prize has fed controversy in the past, but the success of the first sound art piece to be shortlisted speaks highly to both the merit of Philipsz’s melancholic piece and the increased acceptance of the form.
Sound art may not yet hava a high profile in Toronto, but its presence is strong and expanding, thanks to activities on two fronts: creators of more formal, ambitious works, and bizarre underground noise performers. Darren Copeland’s NAISA has served as both community and catalyst for the former set since 2001. Based in Artscape Wychwood Barns, NAISA covers everything from hosting field recording workshops and organizing the Deep Wireless Festival of radio art, to creating interactive installations for children at art fairs.
To Copeland, who studied electroacoustic composition at Simon Fraser University, sound art is “any artwork, whether it’s made for performance or installation or any context that centers on sound and considers all of the entire universe of sound as a possibility.” He sees the term as useful in “treating the expectations of audience members. If I said, ‘This is my latest symphony. It’s made out of car horns,’ an element of skepticism went along with that.” Whereas self-identifying as sound art, “sets it in another place. You don’t need to think of Beethoven, you can think of what sound means to you as a person.”
Accordingly, the works that Copeland creates himself or selects as a curator boldly explore sound. “I was interested in the process of spatialization, or moving sounds around multiple loudspeakers for an audience, and I was looking at ways for making that more recreateable and practical.” This led to NAISA’s original set-up of eight speakers, synchronized through an automated spatialization program, but the arrangement seemed to alienate listeners accustomed to visual stimulation. Copeland resolved to design a new system that was more performance-driven, and the result was a program that translates the movements of a performer, via a sensor, into the changing positions of sound in speakers. Plans are afoot to expand the technology to allow for an ensemble of performers. Copeland is also currently working with collaborator Andres Kahre on an installation for an outdoor pool lobby in Edmonton, where “hyper-directional speakers” will transmit the audio environment of the pool as people queue to purchase tickets.
Sound art is growing in Toronto, explains Copeland. “In our call for submissions Toronto was one of the major areas we received submissions from. Traditionally it had been Montreal or the UK.” He points to Debashis Sinha’s Known World sound and video exhibit at the Toronto Free Gallery last fall as a fine example of increased activity.
An ongoing concern is the preservation of the city’s sound resources. Potential for detailed field recordings is “compromised a bit by the fact that the natural areas of Toronto have big highways running through them”; even Toronto Island is affected by airplane noise. Copeland admits, though, that the urban side of the city can also yield some interesting sounds, such as those produced by streetcars. “Sometimes there’s a really interesting squeak at the Dundas West subway station; it happened to me at the escalators.”
Zukerman shares Copeland’s fascination with sound but has an entirely different working method. A performance last spring at Kensington Market art space The White House by Cuddles, the duo Zukerman and veteran performer Brian Ruryk, saw Zukerman flip over a small metal table and promptly begin testing its strength with a drill, whilst Ruryk smashed an acoustic guitar, and sporadically turned on a heavy metal cassette. So it’s not entirely shocking that Zukerman describes his music as “air being let out of a bag at ten thousand feet while a dog has a coughing fit watching a cartoon toaster perform seppuku.”
A solo performer and member of group Gastric Female Reflex, in addition to creating truly psychedelic art for cassette and vinyl micro-label Beniffer Editions, Zukerman is an example of the type of prolifically productive artist creating noisy, irreverent sound. Zukerman generally works through processing, looping, and layering tapes of previously recorded sound, sometimes slowing everything down, playing it backwards, or feeding it through a synthesizer for good measure. When he first started, “the possibilities of making music with no instruments became very interesting. So I recorded myself playing the hairdryer, opened up the cassette and fed it through a tape player inch by inch while pushing the exposed tape up into the play head with a Q-tip. Very primitive beginnings.”
When asked about the state of local sound art and experimental music, Zukerman deadpans, “Things are pretty desperate all around, I think. I just got word that the last venue in Toronto shut down.” An exaggeration, but the fact remains that much of this art remains marginal.
Fortunately, things aren’t going too badly for Zukerman. Gastric Female Reflex has an album due on German label Pan-Act, and he’s preparing a solo release for Toronto label Pleasance. Copeland was shocked upon visiting sound art events in Germany. “If they don’t get a hundred people they’re disappointed, when we get a hundred people we’re flabbergasted.” He has noticed that NAISA events are attracting a more diverse crowd than before.
Today, surrounded by masses of information, it’s easy to succumb to complete sensory overload. Perhaps therein lies the power of sound art: by focusing on a single sense, one can slow down and form a deeper connection with surroundings. Radiator hum, the drone of public transportation against tracks, and birds hidden in trees are all waiting to be heard.
