Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (review)

Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts by Douglas Kahn. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, U.S.A., 1999. ISBN: 0-262-11243-4.

How do we measure the impact of sound in twentieth-century arts and where is its place in the avant-garde? What is the significance of sound in relation to music as a traditional art form and in relation to quotidian, ordinary and surrounding noise? Is there a specific set of characteristics that qualifies sound or is sound in itself a shifting parameter, varying according to the specific practices and technologies of the auditive at a given time? Interestingly, there is not much scholarly research and writing regarding the introduction of "noise" into music. Nor is there much work that deals with the categorization of sound and music with regard to extra-musical or musical qualities in "new" sounds that surround us in the electronic age that would help us analyze how "resident noise" and "significant sound" were introduced into earlier artistic systems.

Artists working with new visual media have for some time been interested in crossing the boundaries between hearing and seeing. Film pioneer Germaine Dulac "composed" film like a visual symphony. In the 1970s, video artists Steina and Woody Vasulka developed computer tools in order to explore a new vocabulary and directly manipulate music and image, transferring sound into visuals, while Jean-Luc Godard experimented with his "son/image" productions with video as a medium to dissociate and recombine ordinary sounds and images. More recently, composer Michel Nyman has worked towards an intermediate image-sound relationship in cooperation with film-maker Peter Greenaway and discusses common structuring principles in his theoretical considerations on hearing and seeing.

Filmmakers, painters and writers have not only applied musical patterns in their work but have also undertaken structural comparisons between image, sound and text, questioning how a single medium works in relation to the senses and sensory perception. In the same way, audio arts in the twentieth century have shown an emerging concern with extra-musical elements that fundamentally change the idea of music through the introduction of machine noises. Expansion in the field of sonic arts can also be seen in the Dadaist "simultaneous poem" and in voices that articulate the actual and/or textual body.

Douglas Kahn's Noise, Water, Meat surveys the relationship between sound, music and noise in the period from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, introducing an overdue discussion of the development of acoustic concepts that, while clearly related to similar ideas in the visual arts, also have a history of their own. The book demonstrates that the multiplicity of audio arts mirrors an increasing complexity within artistic practices where multimedia and intermedia approaches bring together elements of sound, image and text. Given such diversity, we may conclude that there is no single artistic medium, but a constant process of interference and synesthesia.

In introducing this topic, Kahn outlines significant lines of development that explore the differences between noise and music and between sound and music. The understanding of these crucial paradigms is set out in relation to debates on sound as an internal or extra-musical quality of "aurality in itself," which also reflects upon the invention of machines that reproduce and record sound. Kahn then points to the prevalent technological approaches that expand the realm of music and sound into "all sound" (based on the invention of the phonograph) and discusses the transposition from "all sound" to "always sound." John Cage made this distinction after listening to sounds such as the tones of the nervous system and of blood circulation in an anechoic chamber. Finally, Kahn gives a close "reading" of artistic practices that have shaped the idea of music on the whole and, in a precise and staged argument, describes the interplay of sound and technology, namely "inscriptive practices," from an historical perspective.

Kahn starts with the assumption that "none of the arts is entirely mute" and...