Listening and Looking in the Age of Sound Art

Since the later nineteenth century, there has been an ongoing intensification of interest in articulating connections between music and the visual arts, especially within the Western tradition. More recently, this has led to the development of various interarts methodologies through which such connections may be critically assessed and problematized. This essay considers the place of sound art (a broad and amorphous set of interdisciplinary practices that emerged during the latter half of the twentieth century) within this framework and identifies it as another site on which music and the visual arts have profitably come together. Beginning with the premise that sound is an autonomous medium that is not owned by any one discipline and thus overrides the borders drawn around disciplines with relative ease, the essay explores the following questions: What are sound art’s relationships to music and the visual arts, both historically and in the present? What does sound art offer as a productive category of practice between, across, and beyond these two disciplines that other categories of practice do not? Put another way, what value does it have in thinking through the merging of the aural and the visual in contemporary art and life? And when it comes to reception, how has sound art adjusted and perhaps even heightened the experience of listening to music (among other sounds) within the spatio-temporal field? In this context, the essay addresses three overlapping modes of what is here called visually inflected listening.