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By examining the materials that produce sound within contemporary art, we can approach sounding works not only from the perspective of "sound as sound" or "sound in itself" but rather as "sound as more than sound." Sound can never be without a history, culture, or political situation, and by approaching sounding practices in the same manner as we critically approach contemporary art practices, we allow matter to matter.

Craig Smith, has digitized and shared a 27GB collection of vintage sound effects. The sounds form three collections. They consist of high-quality, first generation copies of original nitrate optical sound effects from the 1930s & '40s created for Hollywood studios. They were collected by a prominent sound editor who worked in the industry for 44 years. The fragile optical elements were donated to USC, and transferred to tape by USC Cinema students in the early 1970s. There are three collections: The Gold and Red Libraries (Gold effects start with "G", Red with "R") consist of high-quality, first generation copies of original nitrate optical sound effects from the 1930s & '40s created for Hollywood studios. They were collected by a prominent sound editor who worked in the industry for 44 years. The fragile optical elements were donated to USC, and transferred to tape by USC Cinema students in the early 1970s. The Sunset Editorial (SSE) Library was also donated to USC around 1990. It includes classic effects from the 1930s into the '80s. These effects are from 35mm magnetic film. They were often several generations removed from the originals, and not as clean, so some careful restoration was done to make them more useful. SSE effects start with "S" About Craig Smith: "I have been recording, editing, & mixing sound since 1964, and teaching sound design and technology at California Institute of the Arts since 1986. In my spare time, I experiment with implied narrative and accidental sound design -- putting together sounds & images that have nothing to do with each other to create unexpected stories."

"Over the past 40 years "sound art" has been hailed as a new artistic category in numerous writings, yet one of its first significant exhibitions is mentioned only in passing, if at all. The first instance of the hybrid term sound art used as the title of an exhibition at a major museum was Sound Art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), shown from 25 June to 5 August 1979. Although this was not marketed as a feminist exhibition, curator Barbara London selected three women to exemplify the new form. Maggi Payne created multi-speaker works that utilized space in a sculptural fashion; Connie Beckley combined language and sounding sculptural objects, showing sound in both a conceptual and physical manifestation; and Julia Heyward's work used aspects of feminist performance art including music, narrative, and the voice in order to buck abstract aesthetics of the time. This paper uses archival research, interviews, and analysis of work presented to reconstruct the exhibition and describe the obstacles both the artists and the curator encountered. The paper further provides context in the lives of the artists and the curator as well as the surrounding artistic scene, and ultimately exposes the discriminatory reasons this important exhibition has been marginalized in the current discourse."

"Visualizing Sound - Representations of Sound in Contemporary Creation stems directly from the LEV (Laboratorio de electrónica visual - Visual Electronics Lab) Festival. Launched at LABoral in 2007, the festival focuses on the convergence of electronic sound creation and visual arts. Visualizar el sonido [Visualizing Sound] brings the same line of enquiry into the white walls of the art center. The result is an exhibition where sound and image perfectly balance each other. Some works give a graphic, architectural and physical presence to sound, others reveal the sound produced by physical objects we'd otherwise regard as perfectly mute."

"Here's an interesting lecture philosopher Christoph Cox gave recently (January 18) in connection with a sound intervention by Andrea Hornick in the Collection Gallery of Barnes Foundation. The lecture, entitled "A brief history of sound art" explores pretty much what its name suggests, going from historical works and artists to relations between sound and other art forms. The philosopher "traces the history of sound art from the invention of audio recording in the late 19th century to the genre-bending compositions of John Cage to the explosion of sound installation in the 1960s. Cox surveys a range of sonic practices, revealing how they resemble and resist approaches in the visual arts.""

"What is sound art? And what do we know about its origin story? We explore this question and more with our guest this week, artist and educator Judy Dunaway. An adjunct professor in the History of Art Department at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Dunaway's recent article, "The Forgotten 1979 MoMA Sound Art Exhibition," is a fascinating look at the history of sound art and highlights important contributions by female artists. In our wide-ranging discussion, we also hear about Dunaway's own artistic practice, from her work with latex balloons to transmission art to a "phone improv" show over BlogTalkRadio a decade ago."

"Sounds carry intelligence. If you are too narrow in your awareness of sounds, you are likely to be disconnected from your environment. Ears do not listen to sounds; the brain does. Listening is a lifetime practice that depends on accumulated experiences with sound; it can be focused to detail or open to the entire field of sound. Octogenarian composer and sound art pioneer Pauline Oliveros describes the sound experiment that led her to found an institute related to Deep Listening, and develop it as a theory relevant to music, psychology, and our collective quality of life. Pauline is a composer and accordionist who significantly contributed to the development of electronic music. The culmination of her life-long fascination with music and sound is what inspired the practice of Deep Listening, the art of listening and responding to environmental conditions. As a Professor of Practice in the Arts Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, she produced highly regarded work as a composer and improviser. Pauline's 1989 recording, Deep Listening, is considered a classic in her field."

"In case you haven't been tracking the progress of group exhibitions of sound art, a short history would be: they are generally a disaster, with many works either impossible to hear adequately in the situation or impossible not to hear while you are trying to listen to something else. "It is in sound's nature to be free and uncontrollable and to go through the cracks and to go places where it's not supposed to go," as the sound artist Christian Marclay said, in an interview, in 2005. Meanwhile, the institutions that are devoted to art exhibition-galleries, museums-are all about placing art works where they intend them to stay. "I think it's great that there is this interest in sound and music," Marclay said. "But the over-all art-world structures are not yet ready for that, because sound requires different technology and different architecture to be presented.""

"As museums continue to search for new ways to attract visitors, recent trends within museum practice have focused on providing audiences with multisensory experiences. Books such as 2014's The Multisensory Museum present preliminary strategies by which museums might help visitors engage with collections using senses beyond the visual. In this article, an overview of the multisensory roots of museum display and an exploration of the shifting definition of 'object' leads to a discussion of Pierre Schaeffer's musical term objet sonore - the 'sound object', which has traditionally stood for recorded sounds on magnetic tape used as source material for electroacoustic musical composition. A problematic term within sound studies, this article proposes a revised definition of 'sound object', shifting it from experimental music into the realm of the author's own experimental curatorial practice of establishing The Museum of Portable Sound, an institution dedicated to the collection and display of sounds as cultural objects. Utilising Brian Kane's critique of Schaeffer, Christoph Cox and Casey O'Callaghan's thoughts on sonic materialism, Dan Novak and Matt Sakakeeny's anthropological approach to sound theory, and art historian Alexander Nagel's thoughts on the origins of art forgery, this article presents a new working definition of the sound object as a museological (rather than a musical) concept."

"Museum of Sound is a project held in National Museum in Krakow consisting of various actions using sound. We are used to watching art in museums, perceiving it though sight. We forget how important it is to listen to it. Sound can extract unusual stories and revive objects. The first element of the project is Sound Microscope - an interactive sound installation open from March 2013 in the Gallery of Decorative Art in the Main Building of National Museum in Krakow, 1st floor. National Museum's Gallery of Decorative Art is the biggest exposition in Poland - it shows everyday life in Poland and Western Europe from the early Middle Ages up until Art Nouveau. Exhibits that so far have been locked in cabinets have now gained new life thanks to Museum of Sound project. Now, visiting a museum consists of not only watching objects from the past, but also listening to their story."

"In many ways, Samson Young is the ideal sound artist - he is a composer with a PhD in music from Princeton. I asked Samson if he was bothered by being defined by the label "sound artist," which is frequently applied to him. He replied understatedly: "Some of my works are not about sound." But when I looked at those works, I found that they were surely about sound - or, at the very least, they could be understood from the perspective of sound art. In fact, his non-musical practices always begin with a keen sensitivity to sound and invite us to perceive sounds that are typically not heard."

"Sound in Context is a short documentary exploring the unique practice of sound within the visual arts world. Through conversations with a number of key art institutions/galleries, artists and curators working with sound in the UK, Sound in Context allows practitioners to discuss some of the issues of presenting and exhibiting sound in the gallery and contemporary art domain."

"What is "sound art"? Should we define it within the context of experimental music or the visual arts or both? While the term first came into being in the 1980s, sound in the visual arts has a far longer history, ranging from Modernist experiments with synesthesia to the avant-garde exploits of Dada and Futurism. Sound art also has a distinctly musical heritage, emerging from the compositional experiments of John Cage, Tony Conrad, La Monte Young, Maryanne Amacher, and Pauline Oliveros, among others. This conversation will serve as the keynote to an all-day interdisciplinary conference on sound art and experimental music."

"Sound art has an identity crisis. Trapped between experimental music and traditional art mediums, it suffers from inaccessibility and an elitist, academic "cost of entry" requirement in order to connect with works in the contemporary art canon. With the recent passing of sound artist Alvin Lucier, the only hope for the future of sound art is in uplifting the outliers who push towards creating new conceptually rooted work rather than continuing to reward artists who glorify technology at the expense of providing approachable entry points."

This site explores and archives the many questions, compositions and ramblings of sound that listeners and creators experience. From abstraction to music, all forms of sound art and experimental recordings will be presented here. Every entry has a playable audio clip with relevant photography and notes. It is my goal for this site to capture the interests of audiophiles, artists and the merely curious. Sound is Art showcases recordings from around the world and submissions for sharing work on this site is open to all. Please note that I am not a critic or an agent. I am a sound artist. I run this site to give back to the artist community and to honor the beautiful sound work that often goes unheard.

"Bells ring, but it's not your grandmother calling you to dinner from the backyard. Bells ring and people shout, but it's not in a train station. Bells ring, people shout and a motorcycle whizzes by. Cars honk. "Dolla dolla dolla," the hawkers call. Despite standing in an underground gallery at the Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C., visitors are instantly transported to the Balogun Market in Lagos, Nigeria, through Emeka Ogboh's sound art installation, "Market Symphony." Open through Sept. 24, this is the museum's first sound-art installation, thanks to curator Karen Milbourne, who has a special interest in sound art. Ogboh appeals directly to only one of the five senses-hearing-to re-create the atmosphere of an open-air market. Upending the traditional museum visitor experience presents several opportunities."

"'Inversion 3: Speaking Surfaces' is part of the project Reconfiguring the Landscape, which aims to establish a new awareness of our environment. This outdoor versions plays over a specially designed loudspeaker that bounces beams of sound off the surrounding buildings. The documentation was recorded with an EM32 microphone and then transcoded to binaural. Please listen on headphones. About 'Inversion 3: Speaking Surfaces': Using a high-definition 3D microphone, I capture the sound field of the public space in Graz and break it down analytically. I then amplify the unheard sounds, transform and compose with them, and create an enhanced sound picture. The inaudible becomes audible; putatively ambient sounds become an exciting, dynamic event."

"This Sonic Constellation Compilation is part of the ongoing series: WAYBACK SOUND MACHINE, A CONSTELLATION OF SOUNDING TIME, which asks What can we gather from sounding the past-and with that in mind, what is the relationship between soundscape and sound design? This is Part One of a three part series-within-the-series, that shares various artistic forms, and some text, of/on sound from the past, and designing and composing sound for the past."

"This class examines the ways humans experience the realm of sound and how perceptions and technologies of sound emerge from cultural, economic, and historical worlds. In addition to learning about how environmental, linguistic, and musical sounds are construed cross-culturally, students learn about the rise of telephony, architectural acoustics, and sound recording, as well as about the globalized travel of these technologies. Questions of ownership, property, authorship, and copyright in the age of digital file sharing are also addressed. A major concern will be with how the sound/noise boundary has been imagined, created, and modeled across diverse sociocultural and scientific contexts. Auditory examples - sound art, environmental recordings, music - will be provided and invited throughout the term."

"'Inversion 3: Speaking Surfaces' is part of the project Reconfiguring the Landscape, which aims to establish a new awareness of our environment. This outdoor versions plays over a specially designed loudspeaker that bounces beams of sound off the surrounding buildings. The documentation was recorded with an EM32 microphone and then transcoded to binaural. Please listen on headphones. About 'Inversion 3: Speaking Surfaces': Using a high-definition 3D microphone, I capture the sound field of the public space in Graz and break it down analytically. I then amplify the unheard sounds, transform and compose with them, and create an enhanced sound picture. The inaudible becomes audible; putatively ambient sounds become an exciting, dynamic event."