Writers, artists and CRiSAP founders Cathy Lane and Angus Carlyle follow their previous publications In The Field and On Listening with a new analysis of sound arts today. Sound Arts Now explores contemporary practices and theories through a series of 20 interviews with artists who are at “early or mid-points in their working lives, whose backgrounds, geographical locations and experiences are as wide-ranging as their approaches and ideas”. Featured practitioners include Caroline Devine, Elsa M’bala, Evan Ifekoya, Hanna Tuulikki, Hong-Kai Wang, Jennifer Walshe, Khaled Kaddal, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Lina Lapelyte, and many more.

In this excerpt from the book's Afterword, authors Lane and Carlyle – without disclosing who is who – contemplate and discuss their findings and give an idea of what readers can expect from the compiled interviews.

– – –

For the last two decades we have always framed sound art as ‘emerging’ but I’m wondering what has emerged and whether it could be said to have developed from emerging to disparate – ‘the disparate field of sound art’ and, thinking further into the future, whether it will become the ‘disappearing’ or ‘disappeared’ field of sound art. I’m not sure whether sound art is going to continue to be a separate disciplinary area. I think it might have emerged into something else: a myriad of possibilities and all these pluralities we’ve been talking about.

So it’s very difficult for people to trace where their career could go, although most of the people that we’ve interviewed do seem to have a sense that they are building a career.

I agree. From almost all of the interviews there emerges a sense of career at least in terms of the chronology of an artist’s work, a progression in which people can step back and declare, “Oh, I didn’t like that project”, or “In retrospect…” or “I don’t put it on my CV”.

Yes, and many of them refer to a pivotal or a breakthrough project.

That’s true, it could be productive to conduct a focused analysis of what it was that made that project pivotal: was there a significant and previously unanticipated amount of funding; was a particular skill finally realised; did it accompany a specific collaboration; or did it connect back to what we talked about earlier as a coincidence of a number of different factors, role of a curator, emergence of a network, access to technology, or an alignment of the stars?

It’s difficult to identify a pivotal work until quite a long time after it’s made and you gain some distance from it. It is something that puts distance between your past and your future and you don’t necessarily recognise that until much later.

Following on from that, we didn’t talk to people so much about whether they would call themselves a sound artist or not. But they all signed up to a big element of sonic engagement. So sound and listening are identified as a central method, inspiration or way of working in every case, and that’s interesting about what it means for the definition of a sound artist, because 20 years ago, we probably would have thought it was someone who worked with sound, or whose work produced sound, and now I think we understand it in a different way?

This might sound boring, but I remember from a very long time ago conversations that we all had around curriculum design where there was an aspiration to deliver sets of skills, technical resources and professional aptitude that could then prepare a student to choose from a variety of different possibilities, some of which would be in the recognisable domain of fine arts practice, and some would be in the allegedly more commercial worlds of sound design, music for screen.

I think that’s true because there wasn’t such a long lineage to draw on and we were trying to open things out to a variety of approaches. What has also happened over that time is that certain aspects have developed, certainly among the kind of people that we’ve interviewed, and one of those is the theoretical aspect. That comes back full circle I think, to our earlier discussion of people studying for PhDs and investigating things, other than sound itself, through their work. Because when you think about it, when we started out with that curriculum, there was very little research or reading at our disposal, and the publications that were available were predominantly historical mappings, you know? At that stage, it felt like they were trying to establish what it was, “OK, this is sound art, and this is sound art, and this is sound art, and this is as well: actually, they’re all a bit experimental music, too, but, you know, we’re kind of conflating the two.” Then at some point, beyond that, as people started to work with sound more, the possibilities became apparent and then the theory followed that – so it’s back to that iterative process again.

There is maybe now an additional part of this discussion to unpack, which is around the splitting off of what might be termed the artistically inspired theoretical resources from another tendency that has since coalesced into what is called sound studies. Sound studies could have been the thing that we were looking for 20 years ago, could have been perfect for our students, but now what has arrived feels a little bit too much in the hands of the researchers who are not also practitioners (though I know that separating those two is already problematic!).

It felt like pushing at the edges of practice allowed us all to build up the theory, so the theoretical and contextual framework was, to some extent, practice-led. But the rise of sound studies doesn’t feel practice-led, or if it is then it’s not artistic practice as we understand it, and actually, what’s happened is that the voice of the artists has become obscured and unheard.

Sound studies is a big field, of course, but the little corner of it that I’ve explored seems to be as you’ve described it, with less sense of how the artistic might constitute a research process in itself, or how the artist might have something interesting to say through their creative practice.

I think that a lot of artists feel they have to be sound studies experts as well, or maybe some of them already are, but there’s definitely a tension.

That is a really interesting phenomenon and could be said to be reflected in a number of our interviewees who balance artistic practices with developing sound arts discourse or sound studies. As just one example, Budhaditya is very active in terms of his scholarship, he has recently published work on film theory and film history, environmental aesthetics, listening.

I wonder whether this is why sound arts are sometimes seen as an academic practice? Is the implication that they are situated in academia, or that many sound artists think, or are forced to think, academically about their work and become a sound studies scholar as well? I don’t know.

So where does that leave us? From these interviews, at this moment in time, if we had to say what sound art was… …I really don’t know whether we could… it would need a long list. In the past, we used to be able to say – and used to have to say – what it wasn’t. I don’t know whether I can say what it isn’t any more. It’s almost like there’s nothing I could say it isn’t.

I agree! On the basis of our conversations in this book, it is very hard to say what sound art is not. In terms of what thematic concerns are excluded; what compositional, performative, aesthetic or technical processes are outside its remit; what kinds of collaborations, partnerships, intentions and approaches to ‘exhibition’ are impossible.

I think what we can say is that it’s constantly shape-shifting. There’s this big emphasis on listening, an increasing breakdown of disciplinary borders, and work that might be sound-led but not necessarily sound-realised, and in general it has a tendency to be politically engaged.

Sound Arts Now is published by Uniformbooks.