Sound installations - notes

For some time, I have been looking for references for relating my sound installation etherSound, and my planned project bioSound, to what has been done and what is going on in the field. I will use this post to make some notes about a few of them.

Bill Fontana is a sound artist with experience of creating sound sculptures and installations since the sixties. He did a project for the Venice Biennale 1999 with collected sounds from the city. Another project, in Lyon, also feqtures ambient city sounds played back at tramway stops. In an essay, Sound as Virtual Image he compares listening and viewing, which makes an interesting connection to Matts Leiderstam’s work

“Listening does not have the same sense of spatial correspondences as visual perception. With visual perception, we look directly at what is being seen, in listening we orient ourselves to where the sound is, not necessarily to where it is coming from. In visual perception, there is usually simultaneity between the viewer and the object of perception.”

Mateo Zlatar has written his MFADT thesis on his interactive sound installation Aural Limbo. I don’t know much more than that about him, but I will read his thesis. I find the following lines from his abstract interesting:

“The play of this work is based on the idea that we can discover meaningful sound patterns in noise, in this case through an interface that reveals them, making us aware of listening itself, as a creative act.”

Sergi Jordà has designed a web based system for real-time collaborative music composition called FMOL. It is not really a sound installation, but its collborative features are interesting.

…TBC