Sound art: the most mainstream and culturally important of cultural commodities?

“There is a perception, particularly amongst contemporary arts critics and arts commentators, but also among members of the public, that sonic art is a relatively new art form. The truth is that sounds produced by voices are among the earliest raw materials to have ever been subjected to any form of creative manipulation.

Speech itself is an art form, and therefore, poetry and literally all literature of the oral tradition are, alongside music, the oldest forms of sonic art, and probably, arguably, the oldest art forms, full stop. On that basis it could be argued that far from being a marginal or any way a difficult art form, sonic art is instead arguably the most primal, the most pervasive and arguably the earliest form of creative art.

Paraphrasing Aristotle's poetics, since written language is based on symbolic visual representations of indivisible sounds, the earliest form of sound recording technology was not any form of machine but was in fact written language. Alongside poetry and literature in the oral tradition, written literature and poetry are therefore also forms of sound art.

So, when one considers music, poetry, literature, theatrical dialog, theatre sound effects and architectural acoustics, and particularly sound design for contemporary cinema and computer games, it can be argued that in its various diverse and widespread manifestations sound art is one of if not arguably the most mainstream and culturally important of cultural commodities.”

The quote above is taken from a presentation given by Joe Banks (Disinformation) on their research as presented in the book Rorschach Audio. Access their presentation in podcast form via Liquid Architecture.