Sound Art Guide: Understanding the Elements of Sound Art

Sound art is a form of contemporary art that uses sound as a channel for creative expression. Sound art developed from pre-existing disciplines, such as spoken word, experimental music, and Surrealist works. The avant-garde artform was prevalent in the twentieth century in Germany, Italy, and throughout the countercultural movements in 1970s New York. Today, the unique artistic medium is known interchangeably as sound sculpture, sound poetry, and audio art.

Sound art is an ever-evolving art form defined by the sound artists who push the medium forward:

• Industrial beginnings: The Italian Futurist artist Luigi Russolo created various experimental musical instruments and is often credited as beginning the sound art movement. Russolo’s manifesto The Art of Noises (1913) argues that the human ear has grown attuned to the rhythms, noises, and beats of urban, industrial soundscapes. He argued that cities—increasing in the wake of the Industrial Revolution—were musical and required composers to create new noises matching their energy. Between 1910 and 1930, Russolo made 27 Intonarumori, musical instruments that combined percussion, strings, and bells and materialized the acoustics in his manifesto’s theories.
• Playing with silence: In the post-war United States, American composer John Cage created the controversial composition 4’33” (1952)—four minutes and 33 seconds of silence. Cage argued that there’s no such thing as silence. Sounds from the weather, from within the recital hall, and amongst the audience members all constitute a symphony.
• Coining the term: Toward the end of the twentieth century, several sound artists had played with a form that was still indefinable. Then, in a 1979 exhibition at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art, Barbara London curated an exhibition called Sound Art that helped to cement the style.

In sound art, anything that makes noise can be part of an artwork. The pitter-patter of rain, spoken word poetry, silence itself, and even contemporary uses of ASMR can all qualify as sonic art.

Sound art is more of an aural experience than visual art, but visual elements can coexist with sound. For example, composer John Cage and Dada artist Marcel Duchamp collaborated on Reunion (1968), a concert in which Cage and Duchamp played a chess game where moves triggered Aleatoric music via photoelectric cells under the chessboard. Sound art can also take on a performative quality. In 2010, the Berlin-based sound artist Susan Philipsz won the Turner Prize for her sound installation Lowlands. Phillipsz performed a triptych of variations on a traditional Scottish lament, performing under three bridges beneath River Clyde.

Sound art has grown to be an international phenomenon, with a new wave of artists continually redefining its scope and possibilities.

1. 1. Christian Marclay: A fixture in the visual art and experimental music scenes since the 1970s, Swiss-American artist Christian Marclay is famed for using records and turntables as both visual and sonic art. Marclay manipulates spinning records to create intentional skips and loops in the tracks.
2. 2. Samson Young: The Hong Kong-based sound artist Samson Young catapulted to fame and won the inaugural Art Basel’s BMW Art Journey Award for For Whom the Bell Tolls: A Journey Into the Sonic History of Conflict (2015). For that sound art exhibition, Young recorded the tolls of iconic bells across five continents, illuminating each famed bell’s cultural and political significance.
3. 3. Christine Sun Kim: Berlin-based artist Christine Sun Kim was born deaf and uses her interdisciplinary art to explore the role of sound in social life and the Deaf community. Her work considers how sound operates in society and who it privileges. Her exhibit Soundings showed at the Museum of Modern Art in 2013, and the 2019 Whitney Biennial featured her charcoal drawings Deaf Rage.

Grab the MasterClass Annual Membership and plumb the depths of your creativity with the help of modern artist Jeff Koons, abstract artist Futura, and stage designer Es Devlin. Our exclusive video lessons will teach you to do things like utilize color and scale, explore the beauty in everyday objects, and so much more.