“Sound is fact, Music is fiction” is a series of sound system installations, which differentiates with normal sound artwork. In this project, it encourages the audience to be a part of the “sound energy flow”. Audiences can use the tools prepared by the artist, and by physical contacting the installation they can make sound directly. By using their body action, the audience can participate and might be recognized as the “possible spirit core of sound”
Those impromptu sound is fully applied to the occasionality of physical contact and is taking advantages of physical vibration. In my project, I try to enrich a more open way of participation, and I want to reflect a more natural way that could be able to discuss the relationship between the Sound Ontology and the Auditory Culture[1].
By the usage of sound technique, the sound created could be converted into a digital signal. Hence at the exhibition scene, by deconstructing those digital signals, it forms a virtual echo system. I tried applying this echo system to build a virtual space in physical space.
When thinking of this project, I came up with the concept of Game Design, which is building up a platform with certain rules. (i.e. the installation is the “game platform”, and the literal description of my artwork is the “rule”, which guides the audience to knocking on the installation.) In this game, the audience could experience the conversation between physical vibration and the virtual sound signal.
Sound itself is a physical / material phenomenon, which each vibration phenomenon passing through a given medium. Through these practices, I began to think: Whether we could use the physical sound vibration to access the understanding of the Sound Ontology?
The auditory system as an early weaning system. The baby crying is one of the most attractive ways of expression during human’s infancy period. As for human, the auditory sense is one of a basic pathway that we build up the communication with the outside world.
These are two aspects in regard to human sound perception: Affection and Cognition.
The former describes the physical reaction of the human brain regard to physical vibration; the latter is more related to the auditory technique, which is more about the individual culture and experience. Temporally prior to its perception, the affect action of a body on a body precedes and thus conditions a subject’s cognitive response.
Before the activation of ‘cognitive listening, the sonic is a phenomenon of contact and displays, through an array of autonomic responses, a whole spectrum of affective powers’. The sonic, as a vibrational force, initially impacts the body intermodally or ‘synesthetically’ before it is divided into discrete sensory modes, such as hearing, seeing, and touching.
The idea of my practice is based on the discussion of Sound Otology by Goodman, Cox and Hainge, and the critical discussion of diversion on Sound Otology by Brian Kane, which characters than the relationship between sound ontology and the auditory culture. Meanwhile, I acquired inspirations from the conception of “Sonic Fiction”, which was raised by Kodwo Eshum.
Therefore, I would like to discuss these topics to show the complex relationship between sound and human.
Reference:
Cox, Christoph. “Sound Art and the Sonic unconscious.” Organised Sound 14, no. 1 (2009): 19–26. Cox, Christoph. “Beyond Representation and Signification: Toward a Sonic Materialism.” Journal of Visual
Culture 10, no. 2 (2011): 145–161.Cox, Christoph. “The Alien Voice: Alvin Lucier’s North American Time Capsule 1967.” In Mainframe
Experimentalism: Early Computing and the Foundations of the Digital Arts, edited by Hannah Higginsand Douglas Kahn, 170–186. Berkeley, CA: university of California Press, 2012.
Goodman, Nelson. Fact, Fiction, and Forecast. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965.
Goodman, Nelson. Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill,1968.
Goodman, Nelson. Ways of Worldmaking. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1978.
Goodman, Nelson, and Catherine Z. Elgin. Reconceptions in Philosophy and Other Arts and Sciences.Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1988.
Goodman, Steve. Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009.
Hainge, Greg. Noise Matters: Towards an Ontology of Noise. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013.
Kane, B. (2015). Sound studies without auditory culture: a critique of the ontological turn. Sound Studies, 1(1), pp.2-21.
Leys, Ruth. “The Turn to Affect: A Critique.” Critical Inquiry 37, no. 3 (2011): 434–472.
Pinch, Trevor, and Karin Bijsterveld. The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies. New York, NY: oxforduniversity Press, 2012.
[1] ‘auditory culture in terms of the shared likenesses heard in sounds among a community of listeners. That is, we can describe the ways in which certain sounds are heard as being like (or unlike) other sounds in various respects.’ Kane, B. (2015)
