Sound art is an artistic practice in which sound serves as a primary time-based medium or material. Like much contemporary art it can be interdisciplinary or take hybrid forms; the critic Brandon LaBelle describes it as a practice that harnesses, describes, analyzes, performs and interrogates the condition of sound and how it operates.
Facts
MediumSound itself, often built into installations or sculptures using speakers, acoustic instruments, sensors or kinetic devices in a gallery, museum or site-specific space. 1 Signature TechniqueThe sound installation: a site-specific, three-dimensional arrangement of sound sources that adds a time element, letting visitors explore the work's development over however long they choose to stay. 1 Place of OriginNew York City, United States, where the Museum of Modern Art staged the first major museum exhibition titled Sound Art in 1979. 1 Notable ExampleLuigi Russolo's Intonarumori noise intoners (1913), an early Futurist example of art built from noise. 1 Connections
Associated With
New Media Art, Art Forms New media art and sound art overlap substantially in contemporary practice, both employing electronic, computational and time-based technology as the working medium.
Practitioners
John Cage, Artists John Cages chance-based compositions and works built from environmental and non-musical sound, most famously 4 33, are foundational to sound art as a practice distinct from conventional composition.
Sources
1. Sound Art (Wikipedia)
Wikimedia Foundationlead section, first paragraph
Sound art is an artistic activity in which sound is utilized as a primary time-based medium or material.
Sound installation section
Sound installation is an intermedia and time-based art form. It is an expansion of an art installation in the sense that it includes the sound element and therefore the time element.
Origin of term section
The first use as the title of an exhibition at a major museum was 1979's Sound Art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), featuring Maggi Payne, Connie Beckley, and Julia Heyward.
lead section, second paragraph
In Western art, early examples include the Futurist Luigi Russolo's Intonarumori noise intoners (1913), and subsequent experiments by dadaists, surrealists, the Situationist International, and in Fluxus events and other Happenings.
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