Cold, stripped-down, monochrome, pixelated, iterative, quantised, grid, pulse, glitch, noise: taken together, these words imply a growing aesthetic connection within a body of experimental and independent (or non-academic) sound-based artworks produced in the past few decades. Although realised in different mediums and belonging to different artistic categories, such works are connected through a certain aesthetic sensibility. Nevertheless, since the majority of these works have thus far received little scholarly attention, a framing discussion of the aesthetic principles and features that link them is overdue. This article examines this emergent phenomenon, accounting for the particular aesthetic features that connect such sound-based artworks, arguing for a more specific terminology to adequately account for this aesthetic across the various practices in which it is observed. Rejecting ‘minimalist’ as a descriptor, this article calls for an aesthetic frame of reference derived through Brutalism, understood as a crystallisation of key features of modernism and its various movements. The first author’s work is presented as a conscious effort to create sound art redolent of Brutalism, locating this work in the context of the revival of Brutalism in recent years, which, as will be argued, can be expanded to works from a wide range of contemporary artists and musicians.
Silencing and musicalization, as defined by Douglas Kahn, are valuable means to call attention to the sonically liminal. They create a frame within which acoustic silence can be attended to, either as a conceptual phenomenon or as the dead silence of sounds and soundmakers subjected to ecological silencing. Through critical discussion of silence in Kahn's writing on John Cage, as well as in acoustic ecology and soundscape composition, an outline of ecological silencing is developed and applied through the examination of environmentally engaged sound works by Sally Ann McIntyre of New Zealand and Katie Paterson of Great Britain.
Discovering outmoded or obsolete technologies and appropriating them in creative practice can uncover new relationships between those technologies. Using a media archaeological research approach, this paper presents the electromechanical relay and a book of random numbers as related forms of obsolete media. Situated within the context of electromechanical sound art, the work uses a non-deterministic approach to explore the non-linear and unpredictable agency and materiality of the objects in the work. Developed by the first author, Click::RAND is an object-based sound installation. The work has been developed as an audio- visual representation of a genealogy of connections between these two forms of media in the history of computing.
Discovering outmoded or obsolete technologies and appropriating them in creative practice can uncover new relationships between those technologies. Using a media archaeological research approach, this paper presents the electromechanical relay and a book of random numbers as related forms of obsolete media. Situated within the context of electromechanical sound art, the work uses a non-deterministic approach to explore the non-linear and unpredictable agency and materiality of the objects in the work. Developed by the first author, Click::RAND is an object-based sound installation. The work has been developed as an audio- visual representation of a genealogy of connections between these two forms of media in the history of computing.
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