Sound

I have made Moving Image with sound before, but I have tended not to.

I feel I must list what have been, up to now, my reservations and resistances to sound:

• Having had a musical training, and being a musician for a while, the subject of sound and music has been in a way too close - I used to explain it by saying I knew too much. By that I really mean that I knew too much about the technicalities and complexities of musical theory to take any shortcuts - to consider sound seemed to me to require an extremely advanced level of expertise.

• There is a tendency to tag on and use ill-considered sound with some moving image work - the lack of expertise and an amateurish level which does not match the visual practice.

• I often find a fixed sound track pins the experience and the audience too precisely and limits the interpretation of the piece. (For example, I admire the work of Saskia Olde Wolbers, but am often irritated by her narrative soundtracks which I feel arrest the inner narrative and imagination of the viewer.)

• There is a logic to having a soundtrack to a movie or narrative video, but less logic to any abstract work - there may be no real reason not to have sound or music playing in an exhibition of photographs, or next to a painting or sculpture, but it tends not to happen. (Although now I think of it, it perhaps is a missing element - why should a painting not have a soundtrack?) But the logic to moving image is similar - why should there be the expectation of sound in a gallery just because the images move?

• I have to mention sound leakage and volume issues. Often wrong wrong wrong in a gallery - often too loud and overbearing. I certainly like conflicting sounds and crossovers between pieces - perhaps like Elliot Carter music, with two different pieces played together. But sound can be a terrible imposition. It can interfere with thoughts and the experience of the exhibition - especially if it is too loud.

• Part of my reluctance to use much sound has been a reluctance to expose my thoughts and methods in the area to scrutiny. I am just coming round to the idea of being more open about process in my visual work, but have felt really unwilling to explain my sound pieces before in any way. It's something to do with the expertise gap - I know alot about music and its inner structure. I know about theory and harmony and harmonics, and also through instrument making I learned about acoustics and the physical and mechanical properties of music. Though my time with Renaissance music and viol playing I studied ideas about the metaphysical side of music. In all these things, I say I know, but of course I don't know, or I forget, or I didn't really grasp the details. I probably have more than a general knowledge about these things, but my awareness of the vastness of that field of knowledge makes me acutely aware of what I don't know.

• Sound is a whole other media -a different art practice, and not a tag-on.

Sound has seemed to me to be therefore a noble, worthwhile, but time consuming and intellectually demanding pursuit, in my case at the expense of visual matters - if I were to consider sound properly, it would take me years to become proficient, like mastery of an instrument or composition.

There are other reasons too - more psychological reasons about the reality of that musical education and the disillusionment  of orchestral playing. Only now can I really recognise and acknowledge the affect of unrecognised dyslexia and my inability to learn musical theory when it started looking like algebra. This feeling of detachment to something I knew in other ways,  by playing, orchestral experience and listening, was frustrating and at the time baffling.

I also had made a decision some years ago to pursue visual art and to immerse myself in creating my visual language. Sound and music were like many other elements and loves in life that would feed in to art, but in more indirect ways.

And yet.

I always thought that one day I would come around to sound, and use it more usually in moving image, and have it as an integrated part of my practice. Suddenly all those reasons above have changed - they are still factors in my thinking about sound and moving image, but they seem no longer reasons not to do it.

It seems more simple, but I do recognise that this is an evolution for me rather than just picking up something I left years ago. I've always liked to multi task - I do it single mindedly, if I may be forgiven the paradox.

Since my first MA tutorial with Emma I have been thinking a bit about a jukebox-like system for work, both moving image and sound. I like the idea of viewer choice - some sound is particularly matched to a moving image piece, and other can be chosen form a collection.

I am adding to my library of sounds to use, and developing preferred techniques. The sound pieces I have made before mirror my visual techniques. I take images and recordings from actual things, edit by paring away extraneous parts, and apply only such layering and time techniques that I could apply manually.

For upcoming screening Multitude I am using a four way split screen about insects I made some time ago - 2006. Basically the other pieces in the screening have sound, and so sound is required. I can see how in certain situation the audience will expect sound - the screening is in a gallery made out of a garden shed - I am keeping the clips short - the entire loop is ten minutes, so yes, it needs sound.

Another list I will make sometime is all my internal art rules - some of which of course are subject to change. I first wrote such a list during my foundation when a tutor suggested we think about such things. I took it rather to excess and wrote quite a personal manifesto - I am only uncovering what is already there. I add to it at times, reassess it and alter it according to use.

I do have some internal rules for using sound, and how I may manipulate it while still considering it legitimately mine, and so I made the sound for screening.

I find myself really reluctant again to state how I made the recording, but in the interest of trying to be more open about process, I recorded the sounds of a hairdryer blowing across bottle tops. The microphone picked up alot of enharmonics. The recorded sound was a little harsh, so I simply slowed it down by a quarter. The result is an alien uneven sound without rhythm. There are sounds and background sounds going on, but they are difficult to locate and order. It sounds a little disquieting, as if it could be insect music, developed without human rules of harmony. There is underlying suggestions of burrowing or something unsettling, but there is also a fracture of high, glassy beautiful notes.

21st May 2012