Sound Art

Sound art is a loosely associated group of art practices that concern sound and listening as their focus. From the Western art historical tradition early examples include Luigi Russolo's Intonarumori or noise machines, and subsequent experiments by Dadaists, Surrealists, the Situationist International, and in Fluxus happenings. Because of the diversity of sound art, there is often debate about whether sound art falls inside and/or outside of both the visual art and experimental music categories.

Like many genres of contemporary art, sound art is often very interdisciplinary, commonly engaging in acoustics and psychoacoustics, audio technologies (both analog and digital), found or environmental sound, exploration of the human body, in conjunction with the standard set of visual issues found in contemporary art.

Other artistic lineages from which sound art emerges are sound poetry, spoken word, avant garde poetry, and experimental theater. Early practitioners include Tristan Tzara, Kurt Schwitters, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, William S. Burroughs, Hugo Ball, and Henri-Martin Barzun.

for more information see:

http://eamusic.dartmouth.edu/~kov/soundArt/index.html

http://www.newmusicbox.org/article.nmbx?id=2413

http://onelonelypixel.org/soundart.html

http://cec.concordia.ca/econtact/9_2/wilson.html

http://www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue3/theartofnoise.htm

http://emfinstitute.emf.org/articles/aldrich03/aldrich.html


to listen to examples see:

http://www.ubu.com/sound/index.html