For anyone who spent just a few minutes, hours or days in the late 1980s involuntarily humming refrains from singles by Heaven 17 (“Temp-ta-tion!”), Martyn Ware, one of their founder members, is going to make recompense. In fact, recently, he stood before an audience in Liverpool and told them that he has become rather disillusioned with the possibilities of popular music. Despite the technological leaps made in sound engineering, most of us still want sound served up in three-minute chunks.
Ware has not repented entirely — Heaven 17 are still recording and touring — but he is spreading a new gospel, and for the next few months he will be touring a concert series around Britain that promises to present the best in contemporary sound art and introduce you to The Future of Sound.
He isn’t the only musician who is exploring this territory in the coming months: Brian Eno, a long-time exponent of the crossover of sound and vision, is staging an installation at the Baltic in Gateshead later this month entitled The Constellations (77 Million Paintings). The idea is to use computer software to create millions of permutations on 300 mainly hand-painted large format slides. Combining about 30 monitors with a meandering soundtrack, a melody and a variety of overlapping “drips” of other sounds, he has devised an audio-visual experience that could point to the future of home entertainment, if not the future of sound.
Martyn Ware really does have a personal investment in the idea of the future of sound, because for the past few years he has been working with the sound engineers Paul Gillieron Associates and Vince Clarke, from Erasure, on a sound system that enables audiences to hear 3-D soundscapes. Advancing on the surround-sound technology that we enjoy at the cinema, Ware and his team have developed a system that adds depth to the experience. Sound from up to 16 sources can be streamed, visualised as blocks on a computer screen, and moved about with a mouse.
Ware’s show will be moving on to Sheffield, Gateshead, Norwich and London over the next few months. Expect to hear some seriously leftfield sounds from nearly 30 contributors, with a different selection giving presentations each night. Troika, a design consultancy from London, will demonstrate technology that lets you hear everything from the sounds of magnetic waves to the sound a computer hears when it reads data from a computer disk (high-pitched and oddly, compellingly rhythmic).
Anna Hill will demonstrate Space Station Synapse, an interactive nerve centre that she hopes to install on board an international space station to interpret the data being collected. Brian Duffy will present his Modified Toy Orchestra: electronic instruments made from abandoned children’s toys. And a man called Flinton Chalk will present chanting recorded in Neolithic mounds in Ireland.
All this may sound like a fringe endeavour, but the history of sound art reaches back at least as far as the European avant-garde of a century ago and figures such as Luigi Russolo and Erik Satie.
More recently, sound art has been produced by all kinds of practitioners who have become disillusioned with music’s confinement to the concert hall. In the late 1960s Max Neuhaus took one audience expecting a lecture, put them on a bus, and drove them out to listen to a power station.
In a sense, therefore, one might argue that Future of Sound marks a step back, but using a concert hall is warranted because it allows the artists to point to the remarkable possibilities technology has created, and, Ware argues, it also allows them to point to the future of art more generally. “I believe very much that the future is in collaboration between different disciplines — between new hybrid forms,” he says.
These forms don’t have to be confined to galleries and concert halls. Many of the participants in the series are involved in commercial projects — from advertising to music to computer games. In this sense, avant-garde sound art is already filtering into our lives unnoticed.
The sound artist Scanner, aka Robin Rimbaud, who recently contributed a sound piece to Artangel’s Night Haunts series that can be heard on the Night Haunts website (www.nighthaunts.org.uk), told me how he has also just developed a car horn that will be available on the US market next year. “I had to meet a very experimental brief,” he said. “I was asked to make a car horn which suggests different things, like, ‘I’m in a panic’, or ‘I’m not too stressed but would you mind taking notice of me’, or ‘My wife is giving birth.’ The idea is to give you a choice of voices.”
Scanner is also working on a gadget that translates all the obtrusive ambient noise in our lives into something more interesting. “It goes into commercial development next year,” he said. “It’s just a box which fits on to a window and reads the sound that’s around you, and through a complicated computer algorithm transforms it into generative audio.”
Some years ago, when the writer and musician David Toop compiled a survey of contemporary sound art for the Hayward Gallery, entitled Sonic Boom, he noted that club culture had made a big impact on the scene. One prime exponent, the artist, turntablist and film-maker Christian Marclay, will soon be showing work at White Cube in London.
Scanner believes, however, that interest is starting to give way to new inspirations. “I think a lot of artists are now using sound as a palette. They’re conjuring up imagined worlds. There has been a move to a more environmental idea of sound, of how it physically works around you and of how it can be used for all kinds of things, even for medicinal purposes.”
Scanner has already developed a soundscape that will shortly be introduced into a swimming pool in a Newcastle hospital; he has even developed a soundtrack aimed at calming the nerves of relatives visiting the bodies of their loved ones in a mortuary for car crash victims in Paris.
People in strange places are starting to listen and take note. And, as Scanner found out in Liverpool, you never know when more will be converted. One moment the audience was laughing at him when he eulogised the sound of bottles breaking in recycling bins. And then, just as the night was drawing to a close, the bar closed, the bins were emptied with an almighty crash and everyone laughed once more, this time listening with new ears.
For tour dates and details of artists see www.futureofsound.org Brian Eno: The Constellations (77 Million Paintings) is at Baltic, South Shore Road, Gateshead Quays (www.balticmill.com 0191-478 1810), Jan 31-April 15
