Surrounded by Sound
“Try as we may to make a silence, we cannot,” John Cage observed in 1957. Sound is ubiquitous; even when we claim it is absent, we’re still busy perceiving it. Cage and Brian Eno are only two of the 20th-century composers who spent their careers exploring this truth. Sound gives us language, of course, but it communicates in myriad other subtle and profound ways, and while we gather information through all of our senses, sound is especially malleable, because it operates on both the most and least cognitive levels of perception. It can tell us where to go, and it can flush us with joy, or make us weak with melancholy. And though it can overwhelm us, it can also creep up on us unaware.
Since sound surrounds us, we can’t discuss it without talking about everything else too. Sound doesn’t exist in a vacuum—scientifically, or metaphorically—and neither do we. It’s especially difficult to talk about sound without talking about sight. We often use visual images like color and texture to describe the experience of sound, which makes sense since vision is the other sense we rely on most heavily to communicate. And in a media landscape where the tools of communication evolve ever more rapidly, sight and sound are increasingly intertwined. Artists have always been fascinated by this interaction between the senses, but today’s culture and technology offer more and better ways of exploring it. With that in mind, we recognize that creative people exploring the possibilities of sound in the most interesting ways are—often, quite consciously—also impacting visual culture. They give us what David Bowie sang about—the gift of sound and vision.
RES Vol. 8, No. 5
“Sounds Like…”
Nov/Dec 2005
