By Michael Valinsky

This past Saturday marked the opening of the Museum of Modern Art’s first sound art exhibition: a group show comprising multi-genre work by 16 different artists. While the definition of sound art involves aural pieces (rooms filled with various sounds and noises), Soundings: A Contemporary Score does not limit itself to literal sound. Curator Barbara London organized the show with the intention of not just making available spaces in which sound was presented, but also spaces in which sound was represented. It is this representation of sound that is the most appealing, in a sense.

Susan Philipsz contributed an eight-channel sound installation titled Study for Strings (2010). Based on a 1943 score written by Pavel Hass in a concentration camp in the Czech Republic, Philipsz’s work is a perfect embodiment of memory. “Sound is materially invisible but very visceral and emotive. It can define space at the same time as it triggers memory,” says Phillipsz. Lost after the war, the score was recovered from memory by those musicians who had performed the piece and survived the camp.

Study for Strings (2010), Install Shot MoMA, Susan Philipsz

Haas performed his piece in 1944 as part of the Teresiendstadt propaganda film and he and many members of his orchestra were subsequently murdered in Auschwitz. Philipsz isolated the viola and cello parts of the score and undertook a note-by-note decomposition that is both eerie and beautiful – manifesting, through sound, the absence of these brave souls.

The work’s adaptation for the MoMA exhibition provides us with a form of absence that is repeated in the work itself. Though Study for Strings first premiered at Documenta in Kassel, Germany this past year with 24 channels, the show at MoMA only contains eight. Philipsz says that in order to hear the score in its intended order, one would have to listen to all twenty-four channels at once.

Absence itself seems to be one of the focal points of the Soundings exhibition overall…

Berlin-based artist Carsten Nicolai contributed a beautiful installation entitled wellenwanna lfo (2012). The piece is housed in a water tank, surrounded by mirrors, and animates ripples that come in and out of existence based on low-frequency sounds we cannot hear. Nicolai is interested in understanding this ‘rippling effect’ of inaudible sounds: “Even if we enter spaces which claim to provide absolute silence, our human presence negates it. Our body produces sound, our body is sound.”

Nicolai attempts to locate non-aural means of representing / perceiving the inaudible. In fact, although the sculpture’s sounds are inaudible to our ears, they are, nonetheless, physicalized and given form. The piece itself is extremely visual and captivating. Low-frequency sounds are typically felt in various parts of the body through their vibrations, and while this installation does not exactly vibrate, it hints at vibrations through the flickering, uncertain, back-and-forth light that it emits. 

wellenwanna lfo (2012), Install shot MoMA, Carsten Nicolai

While Nicolai intends to materialize the inaudible, Danish artist Jacob Kirkegaard’s interest stems in understanding inaudible sound. In his piece AION (2006), Kirkegaard placed recording equipment in four abandoned spaces near the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Russia: a swimming pool, a concert hall, a gymnasium and a church. Each space was unoccupied and generated its own ambient sound. Kirkegaard would argue that each space is a living force with its own voice. He recorded the voices and the soul of each space. Very much in line with what Phillipsz would say, sound is the royal road to memory and history. In recording the emptiness of abandoned spaces, Kirkegaard opens up each space’s history and its sonic past, letting us picture what sounds must have filled up the space once upon a time.

While this historicizing may prove to be fictional and inaccurate, it still allows for each listener to create his or her own bond with the sound emitted. This is helped by Kirkegaard re-recording his recording, creating a multi-layered effect/experience. The re-recording aspect to the piece is, according to the artist, directly inspired by Alvin Lucier’s piece, “I am sitting in a room, different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice…”  Lucier recorded himself saying this sentence and looped it until it bent and deconstructed itself. The recording ends with a drone-like melody that we still understand because of its familiar sonic frequencies. The listener remembers the beginning of the recording and is not taken aback by the transformation of its sound. This is not a coincidence in the context of Kirkegaard’s project: the nature and function of the spaces he chose are oddly familiar to the average listener. 

Room as part of AION (2006), Jacob Kirkegaard

If Kirkegaard wants to show a universal familiarity within his work, Tristan Perich is more interested in creating a unique experience for each listener in his piece Microtonal Wall (2011). Perich put together fifteen hundred one-bit speakers over a twenty-foot wall to create a spectrum of sound. Each speaker is tuned individually, creating an array of fluctuating sounds. The nature of the whole piece changes according to the listener’s proximity to any given speaker. Perich says the variety of sound “opens the scope of the piece to the entire universe, since only from an infinite distance would we be equidistant to each speaker, though in that case they would also have zero volume, and we would be very far from home.”

Barbara London curated a show that not only defies the traditional definitions of sound but also repurposes them. This is a must-see.

Microtonal Wall (2011), Install shot MoMA, Tristan Perich

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