Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound art (Introduction) - Salome Voegelin

Sight

Sound’s ephemeral invisibility obstructs critical engagement, while the apparent stability of the image invites criticism. Vision, by its very nature assumes a distance from the object, which it receives in its monumentality. Seeing always happens in a meta-position, away from the seen, however close. And this distance enables a detachment and objectivity that presents itself as truth. Seeing is believing. The visual ‘gap’ nourishes the idea of structural certainty and the notion that we can truly understand things, give them names, and define ourselves in relation to those names as stable subjects, as identities.

Hearing

By contrast, hearing is full of doubt: phenomenological doubt of the listener about the heard and himself hearing it. Hearing does not offer a meta-position; there is no place where I am not simultaneous with the heard. However far its source, the sound sits in my ear. I cannot hear it if I am not immersed in its auditory object, which is not its source but sound as sound itself. Consequently, a philosophy of sound art must have at its core the principle of sharing time and space with the object or event under consideration. It is a philosophical project that necessitates an involved participation, rather than enables a detached viewing position; and the object or event under consideration is by necessity considered not as an artefact but in its dynamic production. This is a continual production that involves the listener as intersubjectively constituted in perception, while producing the very thing he perceives, and both, the subject and the work, thus generated concomitantly, are as transitory as each other

Sound art’s intention to embrace the experience of its object rather than replace it with ideas. In other words, it does not seek to mediate the sensorial experience of the artwork under consideration.

The sonic sensibility put forward in this process re-focuses philosophical problems around subjectivity and objectivity; it questions the notion of a transcendental a priori; and, via the notion of interpretative fantasies, connects the experience of sound with the notion of virtuality and possible worlds that are not linked to the logic and rational of a visual reality but augment that reality through the blind sight of sound within its depth.

Sound art theory is about sound art in that it focuses on sound as its ‘object’ of investigation; and it is philosophical in that it speculates and inquires into new ways to consider art, the world and our position within the production of art and the world through a sonic sensibility.

The first chapter debates Listening as an activity, an interactivity, that produces, invents and demands of the listener a complicity and commitment. It narrates listening to sound work and the acoustic environment and introduces the themes central to a philosophy of sound art: subjectivity, objectivity, communication, collective relations, meaning and sense making. The second chapter goes on to re-consider these issues by listening to sound that deafens my ears to anything but itself. And so Noise stretches Listening to an extreme and makes a tentative proposal for a philosophy of sound art as a signifying practice of listening that articulates the fragile relationship between experience and communication, and anticipates the meeting of the semiotic and the phenomenological in Silence.

Ch 5 “Now” - In this sense, the last chapter articulates how the ‘pathetic’ invites us into sound and expands the relevance of its philosophy beyond sound art. **should read this chapter. See if avaiable through library.