Engaging the Audience: A Primer for Sound Art in Public Spaces

Abstract

The author proposes and explains four “rules” for students creating sound art installations.

I teach sound art to undergraduates. When my students create sound art installations, they do it in visual art galleries or public spaces. The spaces are varied, but generally share two traits: (1) The space was not originally designed for listening, and (2) the people present are not there to experience sound art.

Therefore, the first hurdle students must clear is capturing the audience’s attention. The following are guidelines I have devised to help them do so.

Rule #1: Don’t use headphones

I am not a fan of “listening stations.” My very first gallery piece, completed while I was an MFA student, used one. At the opening, visitors ignored it as they took in the paintings around it. The experience taught me that listening stations are for record shops, not galleries.

Headphones create solitary listening. People often visit galleries as a social activity, and one cannot socialize while wearing headphones [1]. A number of artists have made brilliant sound art pieces that employ headphones—the works of Janet Cardiff and Laetitia Sonami spring to mind. What these pieces often have in common is an awareness and specificity of place. The headphones in these works let listeners engage in and interact with their surroundings in new and meaningful ways that would not be possible otherwise. If the sound piece can be experienced on headphones anywhere (and anytime), the work probably belongs on radio, online or in a podcast.

Rule #2: Be a good neighbor, or face the consequences

Sound cannot be contained in space. It bleeds, affecting everyone in earshot. As R. Murray Schafer has pointed out, humans do not have earlids. There are hard limits to humans’ tolerance of sound. When sound art tests those tolerances, there are consequences.

I am not suggesting that sound art must be “easy listening.” However, it is helpful to consider that, even though the curator may support the work, the gallery assistants, security personnel or building maintenance staff may not welcome it as the soundtrack to their workday. If a sound piece becomes intolerable to someone, they can and will take steps to silence it.

Examples of this are not difficult to find. Here in Chicago, the site of Sound Canopy, a collaboration between Experimental Sound Studio (ESS) and Hyde Park Art Center located at a busy intersection in the downtown Loop area, suffered vandalism that ended the project in 2003. As ESS Executive Director Lou Mallozzi describes it:

Multiple loudspeakers were mounted in the construction canopy that wrapped around the corner of the building at the site, playing alternating sound pieces curated by various Chicagoans. It was rather quickly vandalized, the wires repeatedly cut at night, and eventually we had to abandon the project and the site [2].

A vandal need not have a pair of wire cutters—the “off” switch is just as effective. (Skeptical readers might consider the continued popularity of the TV-B-Gone, a universal remote control designed to turn off, surreptitiously, any television in public space, a privilege that retails for $19.99 [3].)

I have found several strategies useful for being “neighborly”:

• • Quiet or localized sound: This can be accomplished with directional speakers, low volume levels or acoustic treatments to the space.

• • Interaction: requiring the audience or performer to “play” a sound work, in order for it to generate sounds.

• • Motion detectors to switch the work on or off: this also saves electricity and minimizes wear. A savvy artist might build one into the hardware. Those who prefer an off-the-shelf solution can find motion-activated light controllers at the hardware store, which can be added after the work is finished [4].

Rule #3: The gallery is not the theater

Artists approaching sound installation art for the first time often have prior experience in theater venues (as musicians or filmmakers, for instance). It is important to understand how the gallery (and the gallery audience) is different:

Theater:

• • Acoustics emphasize what is onstage. Sound reinforcement systems allow even the quietest sounds to...