6 From a Poetics to a Politics of Space: Spatial Music and Sound Installation Art

6.1 “New forms of art arose”

In a perceptive essay on Robin Minard, a Canadian artist who creates sound installations for public spaces such as subway corridors, the musicologist Helga de la Motte-Haber suggests that the development of sound installation art “marks the 20th century.” She writes:

With [the] new availability of [electroacoustic] sound material an art form congealed that overstepped traditional boundaries. The development of this art form marks the 20th century. Visual artists no longer had a monopoly on structuring space, just as musicians were no longer the only ones concerned with the aspect of temporal change. New forms of art arose that lay claim to simultaneous existence in space and time. Located beyond the realms of the traditional art world, installations created a new consciousness of our perception of reality. (de la Motte-Haber 1999, 41)

The emergence of sound installation art in the second half of the twentieth century reflects fundamental shifts within multiple arenas: conceptions of space and space-time; the ascendancy of site within the aural imagination; the extension of music and sonic arts into expanded models of sculpture and architecture; and the role of the public in aesthetic experience. Perhaps owing to its liminal position between more established disciplines, however, sound installation art remains under-recognized within historical accounts of twentieth-century art and music, even as it marks this history through such shifts, extensions, and ruptures.1

This chapter traces a genealogy of sound installation art, examining its precursors in electroacoustic spatial music composition from the 1950s and its inception within emerging interdisciplinary models in the 1960s and 1970s. Here, examples are chosen that highlight evolving concepts of space or spatiality and propose new modes of audience interaction. This precedes a discussion of two contemporary artists whose sound installations and site-specific sound works place new pressures on constructs such as “space,” “site,” and “public.” The first of these, Heidi Fast, creates works that engage people’s voices in enacting new modes of community within shared urban environments. The second, Rebecca Belmore, engages what Lucy R. Lippard has described as “an activist art practice that raises consciousness about land, history, culture, and place [and serves] as a catalyst for social change” (Lippard 1997, 19).

Sound installation art, which Brandon LaBelle (2004, 7) has described as work in which “sound [is positioned] in relation to a spatial situation, whether that be found or constructed, actualized or imagined,” has undoubtedly reoriented the sonic–spatial imagination. What is in doubt is whether or not this imagination is critically located or able to engage with the public in meaningful ways. My claim is that it can, when it is founded upon conceptions of space that account for social and political geographies, as well as physical ones. When space is understood not in abstract or absolute terms, but as socially and politically constituted, a spatial sound practice can emerge not only as a poetics, but as a politics; not only as an aesthetics, but as an ethics. Such a critical spatial sonic practice does not merely “happen in” space, but is poised to transform the very terms of its constitution.

6.2 “Music made of sound set free”: Spatial Electroacoustic Music

Audiences at a sound-and-light spectacle at the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels, in which the overarching theme was nuclear disarmament, were overcome by the feeling that they were being bombarded by sound.2 Electronic whines, human shrieks, moans and sirens seemed to come at them from every point inside a fantastical building whose interior surfaces were lined with hundreds of loudspeakers. Edgard Varèse, the composer of this unearthly music, later proclaimed, “For the first time I heard my music literally projected into space” (Varèse [1959] 1998, 170). Someone in the audience described the experience as a “modern nightmare” (Trieb 1996, 217).

Poème électronique, the name given to this eight-minute-long electroacoustic composition, was the musical component of an immersive multimedia work conceived by the architect Le Corbusier for the Philips Corporation.3 The project combined architecture, film, hanging sculptures, colored lights, and multichannel electroacoustic music in telling what Le Corbusier thought of as a “story of all humankind.” Varèse’s music was recorded onto multitrack tape and diffused via an eleven-channel sound system to several hundred loudspeakers along nine “sound routes.”4 For Varèse the project represented the culmination of a lifelong pursuit to add a “fourth dimension” to music. In 1936 he had announced that, while there were “three dimensions in music: horizontal, vertical, and dynamic swelling or decreasing,” he would “add a fourth, sound projection” (Varèse [1936] 2004, 18). He imagined that this fourth dimension would liberate Western art music from its stationary perspectives and allow sounds, which he believed to possess intelligence, to move freely in space (Varèse [1962] 1966, 19–20). Varèse had been claustrophobic since he was a child, and music seemed to him “terribly enclosed, corseted” (Downes 1958, X11). From a young age he had imagined creating “a music made of sound set free” (X11).

Music’s “journey into space,” however wondrous, was not without its detractors. Hugo Gernsback remarked of Poème électronique: “Some people are apparently stunned and leave, talking in subdued whispers. Others are plainly bewildered—some look angered. Some laugh hysterically, others shake their heads” (Gernsback 1958, 47). The spatial sound effects were visceral and extreme: “The intense spine-tingling reverberations overwhelm you as the sound impinges on you from all directions at once, only to numb you in turn with extremely high shrieking, whistling eerie echos” (47).

Still, the transcendent potential of the work was not completely lost, either. The poet Fernand Ouellette remarked of Poème électronique that “one no longer hears the sounds, one finds oneself literally in the heart of the sound source. One does not listen to the sound, one lives it” (Ouellette 1968, cited in Trieb 1996, 210). In her memoirs, Carolyn Brown, a choreographer who traveled to the World’s Fair as part of John Cage’s entourage, remembers Poème électronique as a “gut-level experience, not only aurally and visually but intellectually and spiritually” (Brown 2007, 239). Listeners could move around the “soaring space” of the pavilion at will and “be engulfed by the music” from any point of their choosing (239). For Brown, Varèse’s unbounded music eclipsed all the other music heard at the fair, including at Journées internationales de musique éxperimentale (October 5–10, 1958), a festival of experimental music that featured the work of John Cage, Luc Ferrari, Pierre Henry, Györgi Ligeti, Olivier Messiaen, Pierre Schaeffer, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and David Tudor, among other leading figures of the Western musical avant-garde. “Compared with Varèse’s cataclysmic spatial encounter,” Brown writes, those concerts were, “at best, anemic” (239).

Regardless of its reception, Poème électronique was undoubtedly the most ambitious electroacoustic spatial music composition of the 1950s. Watershed moments in this history include Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry’s Symphonie pour un homme seul (1949–1950), a composition that made use of the pupitre d’espace, a spatialization system that could route sounds to four loudspeakers positioned around and above listeners (see figure 6.1);5 Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge (1955–1956), which was projected through five groups of loudspeakers positioned around listeners;6 and the music of composers associated with the Music for Magnetic Tape project in Manhattan—including John Cage, Earle Brown, David Tudor, Morton Feldman, and Christian Wolff—who from 1952 to 1954 experimented with quadraphonic (four-channel) and octophonic (eight-channel) composition.

Early electroacoustic “spatial music” compositions were projected through experimental sound systems that were typically designed for a specific studio or even a single work (Manning 2006, 83–88). Schaeffer had conceived of the pupitre d’espace, for example, as a way to “restore a human touch” and bring a performative dimension to the presentation of acousmatic music by the Groupe de Recherches de Musique Concrète (GRMC) (Poullin [1954] 1957, 22; Teruggi 2007).7 The engineer Jacques Poullin wrote that the pupitre d’espace enabled an operator “to suggest acoustic paths by means of gestures performed in front of the audience” (Poullin [1954] 1957, 22–23) (see figure 6.2). Following a festival of experimental music organized by the GRMC in Paris in June 1953, the New York Times music critic Peter Gradenwitz remarked, “The most exciting experience of the Paris week was the ‘spatial projection of music’ at the concluding concert” (Gradenwitz 1953, X5; see also Palombini 1993). According to Gradenwitz, “The music . . . came to one at varying intensity from various parts of the room, and this ‘spatial projection’ gave new sense to the rather abstract sequence of sound originally recorded” (X5). Schaeffer and Henry operated the pupitre d’espace for most of the musical selections on this particular concert, while Vladimir Ussachevsky—who together with Otto Leuning would establish the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in 1958—used it to project his own composition, Sonic Contours. In the concert the pupitre d’espace was used to project not only music but also spoken texts based on the writings of François Rabelais, Yves Jamiaque and Franz Kafka. Spatial projection thus gave new sense to abstract musical sounds as well as to poetry and prose, bringing new meaning and form to passages like Rabelais’ description of the Ringing Island in Gargantua and Pantagruel.

Along with developing experimental systems for the spatial projection of music and sound, the Western musical avant-garde cultivated a new poetics of space during the postwar decades. This poetics was firmly grounded within Cartesian and Euclidean models of space, concerned with the location of “sound objects” (objets sonores) in three-dimensional space and the movement of sounds along “sound routes” or “sonic trajectories” (trajectoires sonores). A text by Iannis Xenakis (1958), originally published as part of a volume on Poème électronique, reflected this approach. He described loudspeakers as “point sources” in three-dimensional space: “These sound points define space in the same way as geometric points in stereometry. Everything that could be said of Euclidean space could be transposed onto acoustic space” (Xenakis 1958, 230, my translation; see also Xenakis 2008, 130–134). In the same text he described “an acoustic line defined by points of sound” and “an orthogonal array of such acoustic lines defining an acoustic plane” (230). Xenakis’s conception of acoustic space thus conformed to the geometrical conception of spatial music that Varèse had articulated in the 1930s, when he spoke of “sound-masses” undergoing “transmutations” on shifting “planes” and “moving at different speeds and at different angles” (Varèse [1936] 1966, 11). Indeed, Xenakis asserted that “the conquest of geometric space . . . appears to be achievable thanks to electro-acoustic techniques” (Xenakis 1958, 231).

The audiences of spatial music concerts were not necessarily imagined in active or productive terms, but more typically as “recipients” of music, in line with conventional models of concert listening. However, the focus on the movement of sounds in space as a compositional parameter drew attention to the fact that every listener has a unique experience of a composition depending on his or her position in the auditorium, and that a work cannot be fully appreciated outside of the particular, contingent situations of listening. This awareness inspired new compositional approaches that accounted for many individuals instead of a single “body” of listeners. The composer Henry Brant alluded to this idea in a 1954 article published in the American Composers’ Alliance Bulletin in which he remarked, “Spatial music must be conceived in accordance with the premise that there is no one optimum position in the hall for each listener. . . . Spatial music must be written in such a way that the composer is able to accept whatever he hears as a listener, regardless of his position in the hall” (cited in Brant 1967, 224). In other words, the focus on the spatial distribution of sounds in the concert hall or listening space made it necessary to account for the multiplicity of listening perspectives. This was an important step toward locating the value of a musical work not only within the abstracted medium of the score, but also in the actual, experiential dimensions of listening.8

6.3 “Take the sound of the room breathing”: Fluxed Forms

The experimental thrust of the 1960s provided fertile ground for extended spatial imaginings within music, coinciding with the extension of music into intermedial forms that repositioned listeners as participants in and co-creators of music. John Cage’s course on Experimental Composition at the New School for Social Research in 1958–1959 brought together such future Fluxus luminaries as George Brecht, Dick Higgins, Allan Kaprow, and Toshi Ichiyanagi, whose compositions typically embraced an anti-elitist, everyday aesthetic. Hannah Higgins writes, “The most durable innovation to emerge from [Cage’s] classroom was George Brecht’s Event score, a performance technique that has been used extensively by virtually every Fluxus artist” (Higgins 2002, 2). Event scores were brief, haiku-esque verbal scores that comprised lists of terms or open-ended instructions. They could be interpreted by anyone, realized using everyday objects, and often included audience participation in their scope:

Concerto for Audience by Audience

The audience is invited to come to the stage, take instruments that are provided to them, sit on the orchestra seats and play for 3 minutes. If the audience does not respond to the invitation, instruments should be distributed to them.

—Ben Vautier, 1965

Fluxus Instant Theater

Rescore Fluxus events for performance by the audience. A conductor may conduct the audience-performers.

—Ken Friedman, 19669

In addition to breaking down composer-performer-audience hierarchies, Event scores brought external sounds into the rarefied spaces of the concert hall. The instructions for Richard Maxfield’s Mechanical Fluxconcert, for example, indicated that “microphones are placed in the street, outside windows or hidden among audience, and sounds are amplified to the audience via public address system.” The sounds of everyday environments thus leaked into the concert hall, while everyday actions with everyday objects replaced the specialized techniques and instruments as the tools for musical production.

Artists associated with Fluxus equally spearheaded the conceptual turn in art and music during the 1960s, ushering in extended concepts of space and spatiality. Yoko Ono’s TAPE PIECE II: Room Piece from 1963, for example, stands a universe apart from tape music of the 1950s. It reads:

TAPE PIECE II

Room Piece

Take the sound of the room breathing.

1) at dawn

2) in the morning

3) in the afternoon

4) in the evening

5) before dawn

Bottle the smell of the room of that particular hour as well.

Here Ono imagines a room as a living, “breathing” element: the subject and source of the music rather than merely its context or setting. She asks the performer to listen to the room, not in order to ascertain its acoustic properties, but to hear and capture its breath, and document its existence as it unfolds over the course of a day. TAPE PIECE II: Room Piece proposes that a room is not a static, absolute, or empty construction, but that it evolves and has a “voice” that also changes over time. The focus in this tape piece thus shifts from the evolution of sounds inside a space to the evolution of the space itself.

It was around this time that the composer La Monte Young conceived of Dream House (1962–ongoing) as having the potential to become a “living organism with a life and tradition of its own” (Young and Zazeela [1964] 2000, 13; see also Young 1969).10 In its earliest incarnations the Dream House was a space in which musicians could play continuously for extended periods of time. Today it is manifested as “a time installation measured by a setting of continuous frequencies in sound and light” (Young and Zazeela 2016). This sound-and-light environment is made up in part of magenta-colored lights and hanging mobiles by Marian Zazeela, as well as a dense, synthesized drone comprising hundreds of sine waves, by Young. One visitor to the Dream House writes:

Each sine wave vibrates in different parts of the room, so that the chord you hear changes as you move through the room. I like to sit on the floor in modified lotus position, tilting my head slowly back and forth, from side to side, to create my own melodies and sound textures. The visitor with an acute ear can actually “play” the room like an instrument: explore the sound close to the wall, close to the floor, in the corners, or just standing still. Or lie on the floor and allow the sound to float you to heaven, slide you into hell, or transport you wherever you want to go. (Farneth 1996)

Although the aural components of Dream House do not vary, every turn inside the room results in a dislocating shift in the listener’s perception of sound and space, owing to the action of the room upon an otherwise static sound. Again, the room is not an afterthought but a critical element of the composition, the source and place of the “life” of the work.

6.4 “All sound is sculpture”: Sound in Conceptual Art

The influence of Fluxus upon emerging traditions of performance art and conceptual art is well known (Lippard 1973; Friedman 1998; Higgins 2002). Its footprints can also be found in the work of 1970s Bay Area artists who used sound to challenge the traditional dichotomies between performance and sculpture. From December 1979 to February 1980, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) hosted one of the first major exhibitions in the United States in which works with sound were prominently featured. Space, Time, Sound: Conceptual Art in the San Francisco Bay Area, the 1970s brought together the work of twenty-one Bay Area artists, tying together a number of practices under the common banner of conceptualism: site-specific installation, sculpture, performance, and events. This was a daunting task considering that most of these works no longer existed by the time of the exhibition’s unveiling. In her introduction to the exhibition catalog for Space, Time, Sound, the curator Suzanne Foley wrote that the SFMOMA “had decided to include works of a temporal and ephemeral nature, [considering them to be] worthy of recognition” (Foley 1981, 1). Paradoxically, many of the works that Foley felt warranted this disclaimer were conceived as “sculptures” although they closely resembled Fluxus performance. Some sculptures were particularly ephemeral, consisting of actions so incidental or brief that they would hardly warrant being framed as art under more conventional circumstances, much less as sculpture. In Tom Marioni’s 1969 One Second Sculpture, for example, Marioni released a tightly wound piece of measuring tape into the air. The tape made a sound as it unfolded and landed on the ground in a straight line.

Other temporal sculptures lasted much longer, actions turned into ritual through their continuous repetition or extended duration. In Action for a Tower Room (1972), Marioni’s frequent collaborator Terry Fox played the tamboura, an Indian drone instrument, for six hours a day on three consecutive days, “filling the space of a small, square, stone room at the top of a tower reached by winding stairs with a continuous, circular sound” (Fox 1972). Fox claimed that the “spatial sound” produced by his actions influenced the movement of a candle flame and made vibrations in still water. When Foley gathered such works for Space, Time, Sound her role shifted from curator to archivist, since most of these works could only be shown through their residual documentation. A common criticism leveled at the exhibition was that there was “no art there.” A review in the Oakland Tribune, for example, took issue with “art which happens and then disappears. Except for its documentation” (Shore 1980, G32).

A key link between the Bay Area artists and Fluxus was the German artist Joseph Beuys, who participated in the proto-Fluxus concert Neo-Dada in Der Musik in Düsseldorf in 1962, and who subsequently abandoned more traditional forms of sculpture in favor of ritualistic performances, Aktionen (actions), many of which took shape as sound-based works. In a 1963 performance at the Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal, for example, Beuys “played the piano all over—not just the keys—with many pairs of old shoes until it disintegrated.” He claimed that his intention was “to indicate a new beginning, an enlarged understanding of every traditional form of art” (Beuys 1990).

In 1967 Beuys co-founded the German Student Party, which was renamed Fluxus Zone West the following year. Like Cage in New York, Beuys attracted an international group of students and artists to Düsseldorf, where he taught sculpture at the Kunstakademie. Fox learned about Beuys through Fluxus publications and traveled to Düsseldorf in 1970 to meet him. According to David Ross, “much of Beuys’s work, like Fox’s, had to do with energy transfer through the artist’s ritual interaction with materials. Fox learned from Beuys that the residue of a ritual action could retain the aura of the event” (Ross 1992, 10). Upon Fox’s arrival in Düsseldorf the two artists collaborated on an impromptu work, Isolation Unit (1970) in a storage room at the Kunstakademie. As Fox tells it, they worked “simultaneously, although independently, but frequently came together, particularly in relation to sound” (Fox 1982, 30). Over the course of six hours, the two used acoustic energy to “connect” found objects:

Beuys, clothed in a hat and felt suit, wandered around the room with a dead mouse in his hand. Later he spun the mouse on the spool of a tape recorder and used a silver spoon to eat a passion fruit, whose seeds he dropped with a bright, resounding tone into a silver bowl between his feet. Along with an electric light bulb, a candle, and a cross. . . . Fox had two metal pipes of different lengths, which he banged against the floor and against each other, producing bell-like, pulsing sounds. He also knocked the pipes against the four panes of a dismantled window unit, by observing the resulting resonances, he found acoustically dead spots in the glass. Then, one after the other, he smashed the panes. Now he could reach through the window, grasp the candle behind it, and place it in the middle of the room. He tried to influence an open candle flame with the sound waves from the pipes. (Osterwold 1998, 17)

Through his interactions with Beuys, Fox came to understand his actions as “plastic works that, extended in the temporal dimension, sculpturally form a situation and charge a space with energy and emotion in such a way that the visitors perceive its qualities as changed” (Osterwold 1998, 17). In Fox’s performances, sounds were not considered musical but sculptural: tools with which to connect objects and transform spaces. Fox proposed that “all sound is sculpture,” and stressed that his performances were geared toward discovering “the limitless sculptural possibilities of sound” (18–19).

6.5 “Sounds were placed in space rather than in time”: Sound Installation Art

The disciplinary transgressions of Fluxus artists and conceptual artists working within expanded models of sculpture and performance were critical to the emergence of sound installation art, an interdisciplinary art form that developed at the intersection of music, sculpture, architecture and other disciplines from the late 1960s.

In 1967 the American percussionist Max Neuhaus installed a series of radio transistors along the side of a nondescript road in Buffalo, New York. People who drove on this road found themselves privy to a rich combination of sine tones that emanated from their car radios. The amplitude, frequency, and duration of these tones changed according to weather conditions, the time of day, and other environmental factors. In describing this work, Drive-in Music, Neuhaus coined the term “sound installation,” distinguishing it from music by suggesting that in sound installations, sounds “were placed in space rather than in time” (des Jardins 1994, 130). Neuhaus’s sound installations partly grew out of his experiences as a professional percussionist who specialized in contemporary music. He wrote:

As a percussionist I had been directly involved in the gradual insertion of everyday sound into the concert hall, from [Luigi] Russolo through Varèse and finally to Cage who brought live street sounds directly into the hall. I saw these activities as a way of giving aesthetic credence to these sounds—something I was all for—but I began to question the effectiveness of the method. Most members of the audience seemed more impressed with the scandal than the sounds, and few were able to carry the experience over to a new perspective on the sounds of their daily lives. (Neuhaus 1988)

In attempting to change peoples’ listening habits in a way that would extend into their everyday lives, Neuhaus carried out a series of participatory listening walks, LISTEN, between 1966 and 1976. When audiences arrived at a designated location (typically a concert hall) Neuhaus would stamp the word “LISTEN” on their hands and lead them outdoors to explore their everyday sonic environments through listening. He said that his interest in these walks was to “refocus attention on sounds that we live with every day. I felt that perhaps the way to do this was not to bring the sounds in but to take the people out” (Neuhaus and Loock 1990). Through these listening exercises Neuhaus hoped to alter listeners’ relationships to their everyday environments permanently, by introducing them to a focused mode of listening that they could integrate into their daily lives. He characterized his mode of listening during these walks as being so “intense” that it transformed other listeners’ own habits of hearing by virtue of proxy. He also imagined that this kind of focused listening would result in hearing “sound” rather than “noise” and, concomitantly, would transform a meaningless “space” into a meaningful “place.”

Neuhaus’s sound installations grew out of his everyday listening projects, which he extended into more permanent forms by installing sound works in everyday environments, often as anonymous interventions in public spaces. In his best-known work, Times Square (1977–1992 and 2002–ongoing), synthesizers housed in a chamber beneath a subway grater on a traffic island in Manhattan’s Times Square produce a continuously evolving, multifrequency drone. In the original manifestation of Times Square, there was nothing at the site to announce that there was an artwork there. Instead, Neuhaus hoped that listeners would accidentally discover it, and through that discovery, find a new point of connection to an otherwise impersonal space.

Neuhaus explained that his first sound installations were created for “a public at large; they were about taking myself out of the confined public of contemporary music and moving to a broader public” (Neuhaus 1990, 58–59). He said, “I had a deep belief that I could deal in a complex way with people in their everyday lives” (59). Neuhaus thus re-imagined the listening public as “anyone who happens to listen” rather than those who seek out—and gain access to—specialized listening experiences.

6.6 “Acoustic-Haptic Space”: Sound Art for the Body

Since the late 1960s, sound installation artists have increasingly incorporated listeners into the scope of a work. Some have even created works in which the listening body becomes the site of a sound installation or sculpture. In Laurie Anderson’s The Handphone Table (1978), for example, sound is conducted through a listener’s elbows, transmitting a barely audible recording directly into the body (see Ouzounian 2006). Such works invite what Andra McCartney has described as a “full-bodied hearing” (McCartney 2004, 179). Other artists have created sound installations that position the body itself as a resonant space. The Austrian architect and sound artist Bernhard Leitner imagines that the “boundaries of sound spaces can [go] through the body” and that “space can extend into the body” (cited in Schulz 2002, 82; see also Leitner 1978). Leitner began investigations into what he called “body-space” and “sound-space” relationships in the late 1960s, conceiving of their merger as an “acoustic-haptic” space. He wrote, “In October 1968, I laid down the base for my Sound-Space-Work: Sound itself was to be understood as building material, as architectural, sculptural, form-producing material—like stone, plaster, wood. The invention of spaces with sound, formerly inconceivable as a readily available material, was the central artistic motive. Sound and its movement define space. A new type of acoustic-haptic space” (Leitner 1973).

In Leitner’s 1975 Ton-Liege (Deck Chair), a listener rests on a reclining chair fashioned with speakers that project sound to different points along the body (see figure 6.3). Helga de la Motte-Haber has remarked of this work that “space seems to be a movement that emanates from your own body, or flows through it” (de la Motte-Haber 1998). Leitner’s 2003 CD KOPFRAÜME/HEADSCAPES, which is meant to be heard using headphones, presents sound sculptures that seem to form inside the space of the listener’s head, articulating precise points, lines, and geometries of sound in intracranial space as though it were an empty volume. For Leitner, “entirely new concepts of space open up through extended hearing, through bodily hearing” (Schulz 2002, 82). In the case of body-based sound installations, not only are new modes of listening imagined, but the location of the work also shifts to the individual listener, since these works cannot function or exist outside a listener’s particular engagement with them.

Conceiving of the body as a site in which sounds can reside was an important step toward new models of composition that account for the listening body as a productive element of space, where space is understood not only as a physical quantity but also as something that is produced through the intersection of the body, space, and social action. Until the 1970s, the term “space” was used primarily to describe mathematical or geometrical space. With The Production of Space (1974), the French Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre helped launch a notion of space as a social construction. He wrote, “Not so many years ago, the word ‘space’ had a strictly geometrical meaning: the idea it evoked was simply that of an empty area. In scholarly use it was generally accompanied by some such epithet as ‘Euclidean,’ ‘isotropic,’ or ‘infinite,’ and the general feeling was that the concept of space was ultimately a mathematical one. To speak of ‘social space,’ therefore, would have sounded strange” (Lefebvre [1974] 1991, 2). Lefebvre outlined a conceptual triad underlying the production of space: spatial practice, “which embraces production and reproduction, and the particular locations and spatial sets characteristic of each social formation”; representations of space, which were “tied to relations of production and to the ‘order’ which those relations impose”; and representational space, which embodied “complex symbolisms, sometimes coded, sometimes not, linked to the clandestine or underground side of social life, as also to art” (33). Lefebvre encouraged clandestine spatial practices like squatting and illegal immigration, practices that support the “right to space” of all people regardless of social status. Perhaps most crucially, Lefebvre’s writing embraced the idea that spatial practices can be constructed and deconstructed, reflected and resisted through social action, and that artistic practices could equally operate within this model.

6.7 “Social sound sculptures”

Contemporary discourses on “spatial sound” continue to privilege Euclidean conceptions of space, and are focused upon the location and movement of sound within three-dimensional space. However, many sound artists have challenged this model, inviting audiences and participants to consider the Lefebvrian idea that space is socially produced and not an absolute or hegemonic quantity that exists outside of lived experience.

In developing critically oriented spatial sonic practices, sound artists have imagined new interactions with the public, creating works for specific audiences and communities who have particular relationships with, or interests in, the places in which these works reside. Such works are not only site-specific in terms of their physical or geographical location; they are also specific to the publics who engage with them, and are sometimes intended for a “localized public” or a specific group of people whose social composition is as central to the work as any other compositional element.

The Finnish artist Heidi Fast, for example, has created several sound installations that she calls “social sound sculptures” for various communities in Helsinki. In A Nightsong Action (2006) Fast invited the residents of apartment buildings surrounding Hesperia Park, a sprawling urban park in Helsinki, to join her in a “vocal course” through the park (see figure 6.4). Her hand-delivered letters of invitation asked residents to meet her at a specific time and place and walk with her through the park while making vocal sounds, in order to “diversify human voice in our common, public urban space”:

I will walk along Hesperia Park and sing a long and even tone. Answer me with your own voice, from your window or balcony (or your neighbor’s) when you hear my voice, or come down to the street and sing with me! Sing with your voice until you no longer hear the others, or continue for as long as you wish. The point of A Nightsong Action is not to strive for the clarity or beauty of the voice. You can (and should, if you wish) join it with very hoarse or clear singing, with whispers or shouts that “become” from your throat. (Fast 2006)

Approximately a dozen people participated in the walk, while others joined in with vocalizations from their apartment windows, or simply watched. For Fast, this work did not have any “special meaning or function . . . it was an un-function in a way” (Fast 2008). She recalls that participants were at times self-conscious in that the action “did not involve singing collective songs, but just making [meaningless sounds].” The work’s un-functionality was part of its critical orientation in that it offered a radical view of how collective song might emerge within a public forum. The sounds of A Nightsong Action were not the patriotic songs that are typically heard in public gatherings, songs that serve to further a dominant conception of national identity. Instead, they were nonlinguistic sounds that were not necessarily coherent and that could not be reduced to a single model of collective identity.

In another project from 2006, Song of the Dwellings, Fast invited the residents of an apartment building in Helsinki to vocalize with her while walking up and down the building’s central staircase (see figure 6.5). Around thirty people participated, including residents who opened the doors to their apartments during the event. In a way that recalls Neuhaus’s LISTEN series, Song of the Dwellings invited audiences to form new relationships to familiar places through listening. Fast’s work extends Neuhaus’s proposition by asking participants not only to listen to their everyday environments, but also to create sounds in and through them, an act that draws attention to the “voices” of the places the participants inhabit, and to their own roles in constructing these voices (and by extension, places). Fast considers her work to be “political,” although in a way that entails only “small displacements.” The use of sound is critical in this context. She says:

The voice—or sound in general—is not divisible into parts that can be controlled or quantified. Sound is not easily delimited. This is political, even though it may not be visible. My essential goal is to establish small islets that deal with multiplying the power in us, or in a nonhuman world. That is, to resist the violent praxis in society through intensities other than strong or powerful resistances: to ruffle and round the edges between interior and exterior, to open up the in-between. (Fast 2007)

The Anishinaabe artist Rebecca Belmore has similarly deployed the voice in powerful ways in articulating a critical spatial practice. Much of Belmore’s work, including Ayum-ee-aawach Oomama-mowan: Speaking to their Mother (1991, 1992, 1996) holds particular weight for the Indigenous communities for whom it was created. Belmore originally created Ayum-ee-aawach Oomama-mowan in response to the Oka Crisis, a widely-publicized land dispute between the Canadian government and the Mohawk community at the Kanesatake settlement near Oka, Quebec, in 1990. The standoff, which lasted through the summer of 1990, was triggered by the town of Oka bidding to develop a golf course over Indigenous burial and sacred grounds, and the rejection of a land claim filed by the Mohawk community. Belmore’s installation consisted of a giant megaphone that was designed to carry the voices of Indigenous Canadian speakers directly to the land. She said, “Protest often falls upon deaf government ears, but the land has listened to the sound of our voices for thousands of years” (Belmore, cited in Lippard 1997, 15). Belmore has described the genesis of the work thus: “During the summer of 1990, many protests were mounted in support of the Mohawk Nation of Kanesatake in their struggle to maintain their territory. This object was taken into many First Nations communities—reservations, rural, and urban. I was particularly interested in locating the Aboriginal voice on the land. Asking people to address the land directly was an attempt to hear political protest as poetic action” (Belmore 1996).

Belmore’s project to “locate the Aboriginal voice on the land” is striking in that it creates room for marginalized voices to emerge within a contested political sphere, and redraws the tensions figured in the conflict itself by inviting those voices to engage directly with the land. The intended audience for this project is not the typical one for a political protest (the government) or even the communities who are invited to interact with it. It is the land itself, which, through the mere act of being spoken to, is reconstituted as a living entity, and not an object that can be owned or occupied.

In one manifestation Belmore installed Ayum-ee-aawach Oomama-mowan in a meadow in the Rocky Mountains, as part of the 1991 exhibition Between Views presented by the Walter Phillips Gallery (see figure 6.6). Lucy R. Lippard wrote of this installation: “For an exhibition about nature and tourism, Belmore organized an eclectic gathering of Native Canadians—leaders, writers, poets, social workers and activists—who spoke to their mother earth from an alpine meadow in the Rockies. The huge megaphone symbolized public address, carrying amplified Native voices far and wide. Self-determination and land rights were primary themes, but they were couched in the empowering language of celebration” (Lippard 1997, 15). According to Lippard, “Mowhawk Elizabeth (Toby) Burning said through the megaphone: ‘You are our reason for continuing our resistance against development, and standing up for our language and for our past, because we are you’” (15).

Ayum-ee-aawach Oomama-mowan: Speaking to Their Mother draws attention to the uneven modes of political exchange that determine who speaks, who listens, and where. It shows that the place of political exchange is integral to that exchange: that the positions of political actors cannot be divorced from the place(s) from which they speak. Jolene Rickard, who included Ayum-ee-aawach Oomama-mowan in an exhibition she curated at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., wrote that she found it to be “one of the most significant expressions of sovereignty beyond political boundaries” (Rickard 2005, 2). I would suggest that the very scope of political boundaries is redrawn in Belmore’s installation: not only is the place of politics multiplied and diversified—and the boundaries between the powerful and the marginalized complicated—but the dimensions of political communication also are no longer limited to the sense of language. Here, the sound and the place of political speech are as important as its meaning, as is the unique ability of sound to bypass dominant modes of political containment and confinement.

Charlotte Townsend-Gault describes Belmore’s work as blurring the distinction between “an aesthetics and ethics.” She writes:

Native artists in Canada over the past two or three decades have been expected to be embodiments of tradition, seers, perfect spiritual beings, and all-purpose spokespersons for the moral high-ground. This proved an untenable guide for reading native art and the hermeneutics has moved on. Yet it is exactly the precariousness of their position, caused by the tangle of aestheticised politics and desire, which certain artists of native ancestry like Belmore . . . contrive to make compelling. . . . [It] becomes evident that for her there is no sharp divide between aesthetics and ethics. (Townsend-Gault 2002)

The spatial practice embodied in Belmore’s work is at once poetic and political, aesthetic and ethical, drawing upon marginalized social histories and voices in creating alternative expressions of place and public space.

6.8 From a Poetics to a Politics of Space

Sound artists have profoundly reconceptualized the meaning of “spatial sound” and its ability to reflect multiple dimensions of social and political life. In the 1950s, spatial music projects were predominantly concerned with articulating sonic geometries within three-dimensional space: routing sound objects along Cartesian grids at different speeds and angles; articulating “masses” and “planes” of sound within Euclidean space. Since that time, myriad influences—ranging from experimental music and conceptual art traditions to expanded forms of sculpture and architecture—have contributed to the emergence of a critical sonic-spatial practice concerned not only with the sonic “composition” of acoustic space, but also with the confluence of acoustic, political, social, sensorial, and lived spaces. As sound art traditions move from articulating poetic to political concerns, theoretical discourses must also reflect these shifts. Rather than investigate the location of sounds in three-dimensional space, we might ask: how are spaces socially and politically constructed? How do sound works reflect and resist these constructions? What is the role of the public in shaping these forms? In developing such critical perspectives, the sonic-spatial imagination can be reoriented from absolute to experiential realms, from universal to particular ones, with social identities and political histories newly implicated in creating alternative spatial expressions and relationships to place through sound.