Travel Noises: the displacement of bodies and remote landing sites in some recent sound works

Abstract

Many artistic works with sound often reach to extremes of dislocation and disembodiment. The sense of temporal disclosure that is intrinsic to musical composition is lost in frozen fields of looping sound sources to which the body must become similarly frozen, tethered, and inert, and denied the permissions for acclamation or other spectatorial response that even the impoverished rituals of recital performance are able to provide. To re-connect the body in motion to sound works is to create a “landing site”, a visceral and material form that invites a journey through pathways of sonic disclosure. With personal sound devices, sound and music form an arbitrary accompaniment to literal urban journeys as a high-intensity and disjunct flânerie that often leaks its content, adding a high-frequency filigree to the ambient noises, of public transport of all kinds. An alternative is to consider the manipulation of plastic forms as an articulated surround sound instrument, assemblages of new and found materials that have a material and acoustic presence. The audience as the player of musical instruments. This paper considers the contemporary appropriation and dislocation of sonic artefacts and the body architectures that can help to make their new and temporary locations living places. The ghostly and interminable images of recorded sound are replaced in many recent works through an interactivity that allows artistic process to be held in the hand and carried by the spectator. When sonic artefacts threaten to disappear into vast tracts of memory and remote clouds, the scale of carriage by hand can shape meaningful articulations of the torrent.