sound art that ignores acoustics
I love sound art of all kinds.
But I find it very difficult to take when sound art ignores fundamental facts of acoustics, apparently just to attain a particular visual aesthetic.
Today on the wonderful Networked Music Review blog, I read of another example of a sound installation that raises this particular regrettable hackle of mine:
Unveiled Presence – Secret Sounds 2 by Natalie Bewernitz & Marek Goldowski @ Lab 30, pictured below (photo by unknown, via NMR blog).
I’ve written briefly (and incompletely) about this problem before, in my blog post multi-speaker installation art works: my gripes and likes…
One day, after I’ve finished my thesis, maybe I’ll dedicate some time to properly writing an article on these kinds of sound art works and their sonic and visual aesthetics - both those that respect and those that ignore acoustics.
In the meantime, here’s the (hopefully well measured) comment I left on the NMR blog entry about this artwork.
As aesthetically spare as this installation appears to be, the effect is completely VISUAL. It makes very little sense ACOUSTICALLY to install loudspeakers in this manner.
This installation does not respect basic acoustics!
That is, unless it is intentional to remove all frequencies below about 1700Hz (if these are 8inch drivers), which doesn’t seem to make sense for an installation purporting to celebrate the sounds of the New York subway.
As Wikipedia states:
The major role of the enclosure is to prevent the out of phase sound waves from the rear of the speaker from combining with the ‘in phase’ sound waves from the front of the speaker. This results in interference patterns and cancellation, causing the efficiency of the speaker to be reduced, particularly in the low frequencies where the wavelengths are large enough that interference will affect the entire listening area.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudspeaker_enclosureSo, if the spare aesthetic is desired, maybe the drivers should be small boxes or other small aesthetically pleasing units.
This basic fetishism for the form of the loudspeaker may feed some sort of minimalist gear porn sensitivities, but acoustically it is quaint at best, if not downright insulting.
November 18th, 2008 at 2:07 am
Currently being a second year student in an art school that is pushing for more sound as art works, I share in a sense the same gripes as you.
Not being fully audiophile in nature, due to my what the heck behavior at times and my budget being limited to what it is, I feel there is as a whole, a lack of concern for quality output in a lot of contemporary work.
This feeling can be applied to the main concern you voiced here. Personally I have tried and am going to try better to make some good sound installations but monetary and time constraints are a major burden in this regard.
But most importantly there is no one to look up to, at least not that I am aware of.
I am sure I am just ill informed and/or insufficiently knowledgeable; but are there any sound artists that are truly concerned with acoustics in the “speaker” sense? While there are many artists that do use acoustics, noise and all surrounding variables as a texture in their work are there any that are concerned with what you are mentioning?
My thinking can go as far as to say: there’s simply no role models.
Mentors are lacking!
Another thing that I feel is lacking from a quality point of view, is digital use in art as a whole. Some do it well, others suck at it. Bad resolution displays, pixels abound etc etc; but these are other concerns which may not be of big bother to most people. A whole other can of worms!
Where are you on your thesis?