Sound
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
Illustration: Sheet music to "Buffalo Gals" (c. 1840), a traditional song.
Maxim: "writing about music is like dancing about architecture".
Illustration: Laocoön and His Sons ("Clamores horrendos" detail), photo by Marie-Lan Nguyen.
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Sound is a sensation perceived by the ear caused by the vibration of air or some other medium.
It can also refer to a distinctive style and sonority of a particular musician and orchestra.
Sound is the opposite of silence.
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Sound art
From the Western art historical tradition early examples include Luigi Russolo's Intonarumori or noise intoners, and subsequent experiments by Dadaists, Surrealists, the Situationist International, and in Fluxus happenings. Because of the diversity of sound art, there is often debate about whether sound art falls within the domain of either the visual art or experimental music categories, or both. Other artistic lineages from which sound art emerges are conceptual art, minimalism, site-specific art, sound poetry, spoken word, avant-garde poetry, and experimental theatre.
Sound culture
The first seminal contributions in sound studies could be considered the books of R. Murray Schafer The Tuning of the World (1977) and of Jacques Attali Noise: The Political Economy of Music (1985).
Current important contributions also are Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco's Analog Days (2002); Jonathan Sterne's Audible Past (2003), Emily Thompson's The Soundscape of Modernity (2002) and Temples of Sound (2003).
Sound film
A sound film is a motion picture with synchronized sound, or sound technologically coupled to image, as opposed to a silent film. The first known public exhibition of projected sound films took place in Paris in 1900, but it would be decades before reliable synchronization was made commercially practical. The first commercial screening of movies with fully synchronized sound took place in New York City in April 1923. In the early years after the introduction of sound, films incorporating synchronized dialogue were known as "talking pictures," or "talkies." The first feature-length movie originally presented as a talkie was The Jazz Singer, released in October 1927.
Sound recording
Sound recording and reproduction is the electrical or mechanical inscription and playback of sound waves, usually used for the voice or for music. The first practical sound recording and reproduction device was the mechanical phonograph cylinder, invented by Thomas Edison in 1877 and patented in 1878. The invention soon spread across the globe and over the next two decades the commercial recording, distribution and sale of sound recordings became a growing new international industry, with the most popular titles selling millions of units by the early 1900s. The development of mass production techniques enabled cylinder recordings to become a major new consumer item in industrial countries and the cylinder was the main consumer format from the late 1880s until around 1910.
Sound sculpture
Sound sculpture (related to sound art and sound installation) is an intermedia and time based art form in which sculpture or any kind of art object produces sound, or the reverse (in the sense that sound is manipulated in such a way as to create a sculptural as opposed to temporal form or mass). Most often sound sculpture artists were primarily either visual artists or composers, not having started out directly making sound sculpture. Cymatics and kinetic art has influenced sound sculpture. Sound sculpture is sometimes site-specific.
Sound symbolism
Sound system
Silence
Noise
Music
Namesakes
- Ocean of Sound by David Toop
See also
