Sound Art

Come Together: The Chance Meeting of a Stylophone and a Fuzz-Wah Pedal on the Principle of Necessity

Sound, Sound Art
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‘He one mojo filter’ (The Beatles, ‘Come Together’).  From 1973 to 1975, several school friends and I formed a loose confederacy of music makers desperate to make the most of our respective incompetence. This attitude that has persisted throughout my life. Just because you don’t have a natural aptitude for something doesn’t mean you can’t be good at it. Indeed,…
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Making Ready Duchamp 2: Sculpture Musicale

Art History, Sound, Sound Art, Sound-Art History
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‘Cum on feel the noize’ (Noddy Holder, 1973); ‘Hidden Noise’ (Marcel Duchamp, 1916).  On 28 October 2014, fine art and art history students on Art/Sound (an art history module run by the School of Art, Aberystwyth University) engaged in a workshop that provided a two-fold immersive experience: of noise and of silence. Both phenomenon involved attentive listening, but of different…
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Making Ready Duchamp 1: Erratum Musical

Art History, Sound, Sound Art, Sound-Art History
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‘Time and chance’ (Ecclesiastes 9.11).  Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) was one of the most important visual artists of the twentieth century: the father of Dada, minimalism, conceptualism, and performance art, among other movements. He was also one of the pioneers of what would become sound art. In 1913, Duchamp developed three musical pieces of which Erratum Musical is the most complete.…
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The Amazing Bending Professor!

Sound Art
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‘City of Bend: Noise Permits’ (website for Bend, Oregon, USA).  My engagement with circuit bending (as it’s called today) first began when I was 16 years of age. I stumbled upon the technique by accident while attempting to fix a portable radio. And so did many other teenagers of my generation, it would seem. In the next four decades, circuit…
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Preface to ‘Art/Sound’

Art History, Image, Sound Art, Sound-Art History
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‘What I have in my own mind is a complete fusion of the two concepts’ (Herbert Read, Education Through Art (1943)).  The ‘Art/Sound: Practice, Theory & History 1800-2010’ module will be launched at the School of Art, Aberystwyth University in September 2014. It’s anticipated that this will be the first in a suite of modules, presented under the aegis of the…
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‘Soh’ What!

Sound Art, Sound-Art History
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New, distant Scenes of endless Science rise! (Alexander Pope, ‘An Essay on Criticism’ (1709)).  The Noises of Art: Audiovisual Practice in History, Theory, and Culture was convened by the School of Art, Aberystwyth University, The Courtauld Institute of Art, London, and Aberystwyth Arts Centre on the 4 to 6 September 2013. The delegates comprised established scholars, PhD students, and independent…
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The Noises of Art

Art History, Image, Sound, Sound Art, Sound-Art History
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Noise accompanies every manifestation of our life (Luigi Russolo, The Art of Noises (1913)); I think it is in sound’s nature to be free and uncontrollable and to go through the cracks and and to go places where it’s not supposed to go (Christian Marclay).   The boundary between visual art and aural modes of creative practice is porous. Since the beginning…
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‘It’s Gonna Rain’ (‘After a While’)

Sound, Sound Art
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‘Music is the soul of language’ (fortune cookie message, San Francisco, 20 06 2013).  The cookie’s ‘wisdom’ is a misquotation. It should read: ‘Music is the language of the soul’. This has been a commonplace sentiment in music theory over the centuries. It’s derived from a crude essentialization of Plato’s discourse on the nature of music and its relation to…
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