A sculpture or construction that creates sound, not always of a musical nature, by means of its own internal mechanism, or when it is activated by environmental elements such as wind, water or sunlight, or when it is manipulated. This article also discusses newly invented instruments intended for display or permanent installation indoors or out of doors, since it is not always possible to draw a clear distinction between these and true sound sculptures from the method of sound production employed or appearance. For lack of suitable terms in northern European languages to match the French ‘lutherie nouvelle’ and the Italian ‘nuova liuteria’ (in the English-speaking world a ‘luthier’ builds only string instruments), other newly invented instruments that less closely resemble sound sculptures are surveyed in other entries; see Instrumental modifications and extended performance techniques; see also Electronic instruments, §IV, 6; Microtonal instruments and Toy instruments.
5. Environmental sound installations.
HUGH DAVIES
Although sound sculptures were probably created in prehistoric times, the earliest datable example is the statue of one of the Colossi of Memnon, Amenhotep III, erected around 1375 bce in Thebes; it became famous throughout the ancient world when an earthquake in about 27 bce dislodged the head, which then ‘sang’ through its cracks every sunrise, until the Romans repaired the statue around 200 ce. Legends exist in many countries of similar singing and speaking statues. Other pre-Christian examples of sound sculpture, such as the water clocks of Ctesibius (3rd century bce; see Hydraulis and Water organ) and that attributed to Archimedes, employed hydraulic mechanisms, often with moving automata; hydraulic principles continued to be applied, as in the astronomical clock (976–9 ce) of Su Sung (or Chang Ssu-Hsün), the mechanical devices of al-Jazari (13th century, Mesopotamia), musical fountains of Renaissance gardens (such as the Singing Fountain, 1564, outside the Belvedere, Prague Castle) and the many versions of the Water organ. Several of the curiosities illustrated in Bonanni's Gabinetto armonico (1722, partly based on the work of Athanasius Kircher in the mid-17th century) border on sound sculpture, as do the Aeolian harp, various speaking machines, Charles Wheatstone's Acoucryptophone and Diaphonicon (1821 and 1822), which were systems for conducting musical sound from one room to another, Joshua C. Stoddard's Calliope of 1855 (see Calliope (ii)) and other 19th-century instruments using steam, G.F.E. Kastner's Pyrophone (1869), which was based on gas flames, and some of the earliest electric instruments (see Electronic instruments, §§II and III, 1).
Such isolated examples, however, have had little to do with the explosion of activity that occurred in the area of sound sculpture in the 20th century. The tone for these developments was set by the futurists in the early years of the century, and in particular by Luigi Russolo, whose ‘noise intoners’, housed in brightly coloured boxes with large horns projecting from them, explored the sounds produced by systems based on that of the hurdy-gurdy. Environmental sound performances that harnessed industrial noise began to be mounted shortly after World War I, and are most spectacularly represented by the series of events organized in the USSR between 1918 and 1923 under the general title Concert of factory sirens and steam whistles.
The 1930s saw a gradual expansion of involvement by musicians and composers in the invention of new instruments and sound-producing constructions. The instruments of Harry Partch, though intended for concert use, were created not only as sound makers but also as works of visual art; Partch's approach to the choice and use of materials for their sculptural as well as sonorous qualities has been perpetuated by a growing group of musicians in California who construct and perform on their own instruments (see Microtonal instruments, §4(i)). I.A. MacKenzie went further than Partch in that he altogether abandoned composition and performance and devoted his energies to the construction of open-air sound sculptures that exploited the elements of wind (in particular), water and fire. The earliest works of the Swiss sculptor Jean Tinguely to include sound date from around 1938, though it was the mid-1950s before he began to concentrate on this aspect; it is interesting to note that his sound sculptures of this period were compared with the recently introduced musique concrète. Also in the 1950s the Baschet brothers produced the first of their structures sonores (in which steel rods are set in vibration by rubbing, with wetted fingers, glass rods that are attached to them), and David Jacobs and (slightly later) Harry Bertoia created isolated works in the medium, though neither began to specialize in it until the mid-1960s.
The rapid growth and popularity of kinetic art in the 1960s marked a move away from the traditional concept of the fixed and unalterable work of sculpture (just as in music new freedoms such as aleatory aspects, improvisation and all the resources made available by electronic technology gave rise to new attitudes to composition and performance). Sounding elements were soon adopted by several sculptors previously involved in kinetic techniques, who decided to exploit rather than ignore or attempt to disguise the incidental sounds produced by mechanisms and materials. The practitioners in this area have not only been sculptors: musicians have been responsible for much highly original work on sound environments and even some sculpture.
The first exhibitions to survey a range of activities related to sound sculpture were mounted in Vancouver, Edinburgh, Ghent, and Oakland, California, in the mid-1970s, since when such events have become increasingly frequent and popular. Most sound sculptures function independently (by means of one of the driving forces described in §2(i–iii) below), but a few are designed to be operated by the public, or incorporate controls so that the visitor may modify their operation (see §2(iv)). Works of this type must be robust and able to survive minor damage, but a number of sculptors have explored this area because of the rewards that the active participation of the ‘consumer’ can offer.
Considerable use has been made of two of the three volatile elements for operating sound sculptures. Fire has, not surprisingly, found little application, though it was used in one work each by I.A. MacKenzie and Annea Lockwood, as well as in constructions based on the Pyrophone including ones by the Bow Gamelan Ensemble, Norman Andersen, Andreas Öldorp, Trimpin (Fireorgan), Michel Moglia (Orgue à feu) and Bastiaan Maris (Large Hot Pipe Organ).
Water has regained the importance it had up to the Renaissance, both in gallery exhibits and in open-air environments. Rain falling on resonant surfaces is the basis of Luis Frangella's Rain Music II (which has antenna-like beaters) and Peter Appleton's Rain Microphone (based on amplified strings); water dripping on resonant objects forms the basis for Trimpin's computer-controlled Liquid Percussion and, from melted ice, in Mineko Grimmer (‘audible sculptures’). Flowing river water activates the strings of the Hydrophone by Max Eastley, and the rising tide varies the pitch of his aeolian Marine Organ. Water inside a sealed container produces pitch and timbre glissandos in Richard Water's Waterphone, while containers with small holes produce patterns of drips in environmental installations and performances by George Brecht, Brian Eno and Eastley. Modern versions of more traditional applications of water are found in the fountains of the Baschet brothers and the water clock of Andy Plant and Tim Hunkin. Water is pumped through tubing in Max Neuhaus's Water Whistle (1971) and has also been used in sound sculptures and installations by I.A. MacKenzie, Douglas Hollis and Jacques Dudon (over 100 works).
The aeolian principle has been very widely employed, mostly in variants of the Aeolian harp. Reinterpretations of the traditional design have been executed by Robert Archer, Douglas Ewart (in bamboo, metal and plastic), Sverre Larssen and Richard Waters. Giant versions of the aeolian harp have been constructed: an early example was Abbot Giulio Cesare Gattoni's ‘armonia meteorologica’ (c1783), a giant 15-string aeolian harp that functioned as a barometer, strung from his house to a nearby church tower. Recent ones are by Douglas Hollis, Bill and Mary Buchen (the quadrant-shaped, 60-string Wind Bow, which stands 3·5 metres high, and the Wind Antenna), Giuseppe Chiari, Ward McCain (who built a harp about 6 metres high on Cape Cod), Ron Konzak's Puget Sound Wind Harp (7 metres high), William Louis Soerensen's two 2 Hanstholm Vindharper (1985) with 6 strings of 15 metres and 3 strings of 17 metres and the Gigantic Aeolian Harp of Thaddeus Holownia with Gordon Monahan (8 strings of 18 metres) by the Bay of Fundy; Mario Bertoncini made a group of aeolian harps up to 7 metres high, of unusual shapes and tunings, for his composition Vele (1974). Eastley has also made ground harps and tree harps, as well as aeolian monochords.
Besides string constructions, the aeolian principle has been applied in sculptures based on pipes (as in Eastley's ‘aeolian flutes’, which consist of sets of up to 27 pipes) and various types of chime (such as the ‘swinging bars’ of Harry Bertoia and Skip La Plante's wind chimes assembled from found household objects including keys and forks). Other outdoor aeolian instruments and constructions have been built by I.A. MacKenzie (who made a total of 53, based on strings, pipes, chimes, bells and drums, sometimes variously combined), Paul Burwell, Kan Masuda and John Gibbon (Bell Garden); the Baschet brothers have built musical windmills.
Automatic operation of sound sculptures, in many cases similar to that employed in a Mechanical instrument to produce sounds, have been achieved in a variety of ways. Mechanisms involving punched paper tape, pinned barrels and drawn sound notation, as well as computer programmes, have been used to control electric, especially electropneumatic, systems (sometimes adapted from vacuum cleaners), and to operate percussion devices; artists who have explored such methods include Norman Andersen, Stephan von Huene, David Jacobs, Martin Riches, Stephen Goodman, Trimpin, Chico MacMurtrie's lifelike musical robots, Godfried-Willem Raes' ensemble of Pneumafoons and installations by Peter Bosch with Simone Simons. Pipe organ-like installations have been constructed by Horst Rickels, Yoshi Wada, Günter Demnig (infrasonic sounds), Ivan Levasseur and Hans van Koolwijk. Electromechanical timers are an essential part of the sound-producing process in some of Jacobs's work and in the Electromagnetic musical series by Takis.
Electric motors have proved a versatile source of motive power, and some of the ways in which they have been applied are represented by the work of Joe Jones, Jean Tinguely, Eastley (including the Centriphone family), and in individual works by Bertoncini and others. In some cases the supreme regularity possible with a motorized system is tempered by suspending the motor itself so that its changing momentum or the striking action of a suspended beater (especially where this is more distant from the motor, such as more than one metre) affects its position relative to the sounding element; in others the interaction of various parts of the sculpture, not all controlled directly by the motor, may provide a random element. Motors have been used to create a wide range of sounds and visual effects, from Eastley's dancing stick figures to the often comical cavortings of Tinguely's cumbersome machinery in, for example, the four enormous Méta-harmonie constructions (fig.1) and the slowly rotating steel strips used by Len Lye. In the music machines of Remko Scha suspended electric guitars are played by ropes that are rotated by means of electric drills. Since the early 1980s electromechanically or computer controlled (sometimes keyboard-operated) motorized ‘orchestras’ have been constructed by Jacques Rémus, Peter Sinclair, Pierre Bastien, Frédéric Le Junter, Kent Tankred, Ernie Althoff, Peter Vogel, Ken Butler, Matt Heckert, Erwin Stache and the sounding robots of Maxime de la Rochefoucauld (Maxime Rioux). Sound is more incidental in the work of artists like Rebecca Horn, in whose Concert for Anarchy (1990) the keys of an inverted suspended grand piano are alarmingly disgorged and then retracted, and the visually-designed Fonics string instruments of Jean Weinfeld.
Electronic oscillators and sound-modification and -patterning circuitry are used in many sound sculptures. Among the earliest were the Musikmaskin I (1961), the prototype for the equipment in the Elektronmusikstudion in Stockholm, and the series of electrically powered mobiles, incorporating oscillators, built by the French composer Marcel van Thienen from 1963. Most systems of this sort are either fully automatic, using sequencers, memories or microcomputer control (as in the work of Stanley Lunetta and Max Neuhaus), or their operation is modified by changes in the environment. Solar panels are used to produce varying amounts of electrical current to power the sound-generating systems in Alvin Lucier's Solar Sounder installation and in work by Peter Appleton, Liz Phillips and James Seawright, and sensors such as photoelectric cells that respond to changes in the level of light they receive, whether caused by the varying intensity of daylight or by shadows cast by passing people, have been used to supply variable resistance in other works by Appleton, Phillips and Seawright, as well as by Dale Amundson, Eastley, Howard Jones and Lunetta (for descriptions of other similar environmental installations, see Drawn sound); sensors for wind speed and direction control aspects of pieces by Lunetta, Neuhaus, Phillips and Seawright. The Pygmy Gamelan of Paul de Marinis and works by Juan Downey respond not only to movement but also to radio transmissions. The arrays of loudspeakers in Dick Raaijmakers' Three Ideofonen (1967–71) are activated not by electrical signals but by rolling balls and swinging plates coming into direct contact with their cones. Felix Hess' 100 suspended electronic ‘frogs’ become more vocally interactive in quiet situations. More self-contained are the small installations of Rolf Julius and Takehisa Kosugi. Large-scale electronic installations such as David Tudor's Rainforest IV, despite their sculptural quality, are closer in function to musical instruments and are discussed in Electronic instruments, §IV, 6.
Sound sculptors have explored various possibilities for involving exhibition visitors interactively in the creation or modification of the sounds produced by their constructions. At their simplest such systems require only a touch to set them going: of this type are the pieces by the Baschet brothers, Bertoia, Kan Masuda and Charles Mattox in which motive power is derived from springs, curved surfaces or pendulum-like mechanisms that run for a certain time until they lose momentum. In Manos Tsangaris's Kugelbahn installations (Bowling Alley, 1997), pulling a handle activates a rolling ball which triggers a variety of sounds in a three dimensional labyrinth. Various sound makers are activated by stepping on different parts of a carpeted surface in Horst Gläsker's Tret-Orgel-Teppich-Objekt and the Association Cerf-Volant's Musique au sol. Edmund Kieselbach's sound works mostly consist of pairs of large wheels (up to 84 cm in diameter) which have rattles, chime bars and cymbals mounted on the crossbar that connects them; the sounding devices are set in motion or struck as the wheels rotate. In both concert and ‘promenade’ versions of Richard Lerman's Travelon Gamelon (1979), and Raes's Dudafoon (modelled on Marcel Duchamp's dadaist sculpture Roue de bicyclette, 1913), the sounds made in various ways by the spokes of the wheels as they turn are amplified; in the Fietskraker of Michel Waisvisz dynamos activated by bicycle wheels power small oscillator circuits.
A number of electronic and electro-acoustic systems have been designed in which members of the public play some part in generating or modifying the sound. Waisvisz constructed several such pieces, some based on his Kraakdoos synthesizer, in which the operator makes connections by means of touch-plates between different parts of oscillator circuits; Ken Gray's perspex sculptures function in a similar way, while individual works by Downey and Mattox are controlled by photoelectric cells or theremin antennae. In some of the works of Vogel and Walter Giers the electronic circuitry is meticulously arranged in parallel lines – for example, vertically or as a square – and framed like a picture, with controls for parameters such as speed and volume mounted on the front. In cases where the operator not only initiates the activity of the sound sculpture but continues to interact with it, the sculptor sometimes adds another dimension in the form of different surfaces to give variety of tactile experience. Both Waisvisz and Gray have included such elements in their work, as has Hugh Davies in his acoustic and electro-acoustic sculptures, in particular the series of Feelie Boxes constructed in collaboration with John Furnival.
The devices used by sculptors to generate sound are inherently no different from those at work in musical instruments, but since the nature of sound sculpture is to please the eye as well as the ear, artists have often exploited more unusual vibratory mechanisms or the most extreme aspects of familiar principles. Materials include those developed in the 20th century, such as new metallic alloys, plastics, nylon and other fibres, as well as traditional materials little used in more standard Western instruments, such as bamboo, glass, ceramics and stone.
The friction rod principle on which the Nail violin is based is one that has been little applied in conventional instruments, but it has proved a fertile source of ideas for sound sculptors. Metal, wooden or glass rods, fixed at one end, which may be rubbed, struck or plucked, have been used in many different ways, notably by the Baschet brothers in their Structures sonores, in the Waterphone (fig.2), the series of Bow Chimes and Buzz Chimes constructed by Robert Rutman, the ‘Sonambient’ sculptures of Bertoia (fig.3) and Reinhold Marxhausen's small sea-urchin-like brass and stainless steel doorknobs and ‘headphones’ against which the listener's ear is pressed, as well as small sculptural boxes in which, when inverted, small stones (Robert Rauschenberg's Music Box, 1953, two versions) or balls (Joseph Sorrell, various) fall past protruding internal nails. In some cases the rods are as much as 6 metres long and very thin in proportion to their length. Another aspect that contributes to the visual aspect of certain works of this kind is the resonator, which may be quirky and ingenious or simply aesthetic: the metal sound radiators sculpted by the Baschet brothers are beautiful as well as functional. (fig.4).
A good example of an extreme application of traditional principles is the use of very long strings (see also the giant aeolian harps discussed in §2 (i) above). A long string cannot achieve the tension of the strings of a conventional instrument; this means that though the fundamental and some of the lower harmonics may be too low to be audible, a rich overtone spectrum (based on normally inaudible longitudinal vibrations) is created by the imbalances between the tension, gauge and length of the string. In some instances the strings are at a very low tension, as in Eastley's aeolian Elastic Aerophone, which has strings of extruded latex between 20 cm and 15 metres long, and one version of Akio Suzuki's Analapos, in which the vibratory mechanism is a coiled spring at least 8 metres long. Long monochords, having strings of about 10–15 metres, made of piano wire, with suspended resonators at one or both ends, have been set up by Paul Burwell, while albrecht/d. has installed similar constructions about 11 metres long in outdoor sites. Ellen Fullman has developed several forms of her Long String Instrument since 1981, the principal version consists of 175 strings of up to 30 metres in length, tuned to 43 divisions of the octave. Amplified strings are used in Kagel's Rahmenharfe, which has five electric guitar strings 6 metres long, Gordon Mumma's Megaton for William Burroughs (1963), in which they are set in motion by small objects that move along them, this also occurs with loudspeaker ‘cable cars’ in Rolf Lange bartels's Seilbahnmusik (1987) and model railway engines in Nicolas Collins's When John Henry was a Little Baby (1993–6), an engine's pantograph varies the sounding length of a struck string in Collins's Under the Sun (1984), and some of the Snareninstallaties of Paul Panhuysen, originally with Johan Goedhart, in which strings of twine, dental floss, nylon or steel, up to 100 metres long, are stretched across a floor or between floor and walls or ceiling in parallel or fan shapes. A monochord about 27 metres long is driven by an electronic oscillator in Lucier's Music on a Long Thin Wire (1977), and a similar technique is used with shorter strings in several sound sculptures by Appleton. Several artists have installed string environments in gallery rooms: Magic Carpet (c1970) by Alvin Curran and Paul Klerr has strings of cotton, waxed wool, gut, nylon and steel, from some of which are suspended groups of tube and bar chimes; and Terry Fox (several since 1976). In William Louis Soerensen's La Fonction Sonore (1982) the public plays long string instruments from 30 to 70 metres in length. Appleton's Wind Harp (1985) is a 40-metre flat sprung steel strip stretched over a Volkswagen Beetle car as a resonator. Alan Lamb made a number of impressive aeolian recordings (1976–84) of the wind blowing through abandoned and subsequently disintegrated telephone wires in his ‘Faraway Wind Organ’. Other long string installations made of ‘found’ materials include Atle Pakutsch Gundersen's bowed and struck ‘transport wires’ (typically 200 metres long) for remote Norwegian farmhouses high up on mountainsides (c1990) and Jon Rose's wire and barbed-wire fences (up to 20 metres).
Sounds produced by percussive means, using both new versions of traditional instruments and materials that have not for the most part been exploited in musical contexts, have been very widely explored. Gongs of different shapes, sizes and materials have been made by Bertoia, Frederick Kiesler, Arthéa (Franky Bourlier and Goa Alloro), John Grayson, Bob Wilhite and Annea Lockwood (in her Glass Concert), while Takis built electromagnetically struck gongs up to 3 metres across and applied the same principle to a series of found objects in Big Tube and to giant wooden beams in a number of works made since the 1970s. Paul Fuchs’ Ballastsaite and Holzblockwagen expand the scale of concert instruments for outdoor installation, and Robert Rutman's Steel Cellos are large upright monochords with steel resonators. Bells, klaxons, car horns, sirens and other sound signalling devices have been incorporated in many sound sculptures, including the Bellenorgel of Raes, Wendy Chambers's Car Horn Organ, and Arthur Frick's Beep Mobile, a three-wheeled construction to which over a dozen car horns are attached. Bell-like sounds are produced by stroking, hitting or ‘sweeping’ the suspended brass and aluminium tubes up to 3 metres long in Bruce Fier's series of works called Soundings, one of which, the Sound Spiral, has 254 tubes. More conventional applications of bell-like objects are found in the bell-towers of the Baschet brothers. Scrap materials and found objects have been widely used in sound sculptures, mostly to make percussive sounds. Much of Tinguely's work uses such materials, as do the ‘adventure playground’ constructions of Volker Harlan and David Sawyer's work with Echo City, John Gibbon's Bell Garden and the 24-note Musical Carillon by Tony Price, which consists of tubular bells about 6 metres long made of scrap material. Long plastic tubes function as sounding tubes or resonators in outdoor installations by Soerersen. More incidental sounds are produced by some sculptures, including several works by Yaacov Agam. Stone sculptures are struck or rubbed: Elmar Daucher slices dark green serpentine or black Swedish granite into square or rectangular ‘rods’ or ‘bars’, while Amalia del Ponte has created several ensembles of carved sculptural lithophones, mostly in marble, serpentine or travertine.
Outdoor sound sculptures include Alfons van Legelo's Dance Chimes (see Toy instruments) which have been installed in many countries, and Bill and Mary Buchen's four-acre sound sculpture at Lake Placid, NY. In recent years small bells and chimes have become popular for environmental situations like domestic homes and gardens. The percussionist Garry Kvistad founded Woodstock Chimes, which manufactures wind chimes in a choice of tunings (including Gregorian, Ancient Greek, Blues, ‘Partch’, four ‘Feng Shui’ scales – Fortune, Energy, Imagination and Peace – and several oriental scales), as well as small temple bells and garden bells (flower-shapes on stalks); other companies have produced similar general purpose wind chimes. The Hiroshima and Nagasaki Peacebell and the Cosanti Bronze Windbell (Paolo Soleri; Arcosanti, Arizona) fulfil similar functions. A rather different use of simple environmental instruments is in jewellery of miniature harps and percussion such as bells.
A number of composers have used existing sculptures as percussion instruments in their works or have commissioned from sculptors new constructions for use as instruments. In 1944 John Cage included sounds played on mobiles by Alexander Calder in his soundtrack for the film Works of Calder, and 20 years later Calder created the mobile Chef d'orchestre for Earle Brown's Calder Piece (1966). Performance on sculptures by Armand Vaillancourt is accompanied by a tape based on similar sounds in each of Pierre Mercure's compositions Structures métalliques (1961); the same combination with tape occurs in Herbert Deutsch's Contours and Improvisations (1963, with welded steel sculpture by Jason Seley) and Leo Nilson's Skulpturmusik (1966, with a sculpture by Olle Adrin). Three performers are required to play the Artaudofoon, a percussion sculpture amplified by 40 contact microphones, which was built by Frans de Boer Lichtveld for Peter Schat's music theatre work Electrocutie (1966). Taped electronic compositions based on sounds produced by sculpture include Toshi Ichiyanagi's Mixture and Music for Tinguely (both 1963, based on works by Jean Tinguely) and Andrés Lewin-Richter's Baschetiada (1980, using sound sculptures by the Baschet brothers), as well as Roberto Gerhard's Sculpture I (1963, John Youngman) and Josep M. Mestres Quadreny's Peça per a serra mecanica (1964, Moises Villelia). Since 1987 Derek Shiel's percussive sound sculptures have been featured in works by Julia Usher and others.
Outdoor installations of a sculptural nature that produce musical sounds are known in many cultures. Typical examples are the water-powered systems found in East Asia in which tuned bamboo tubes on pivots fill with water until they topple over, striking stones or other bamboo tubes as they fall or as they return empty to their starting position (e.g. the tang koa of Central Vietnam), and wind chimes of different materials used for scaring birds or simply for decoration.
Many Western musicians and artists, especially since 1960, have designed not only instruments for permanent installation in or out of doors, but special sound environments carefully tailored to the specific location; an exhibition of documentation on such projects, some of which have been extremely ambitious, was held in Rimini in 1982. The development of interest in the creation of new sound environments (often linked with the various visual equivalents that are known by names such as ‘land art’ and ‘arte povera’) has been matched by an increasing concern with the quality of the existing sound environment; this has been fostered particularly by the work of the World Soundscape Project, founded in 1971 by R. Murray Schafer at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, which has issued a number of publications.
Specially constructed sound environments are of several types. In many cases sound-producing systems (such as those discussed in §2 above) are permanently installed or exhibited and function constantly, intermittently or when manipulated, depending on their design. Of this type are various special parks containing simple sturdy instruments such as gongs and large ground harps, a permanent environment for handicapped children installed in Vancouver in the mid-1970s by John Grayson (who also published plans for a sonorous Exploratorium), unusual acoustic situations designed by Hugh Davies, Bow Gamelan Ensemble's scrap metal installations, the work of Echo City, and the soundscapes that result whenever sound sculptures are exhibited together. Other projects, such as those presented at festivals in Essen and Linz, the seaside, forest and town events mounted by Trevor Wishart, and presentations organized by composers such as Charlie Morrow and Pauline Oliveros in which many participants interact with the sounds of a certain environment by making musical sounds of their own, are more in the nature of outdoor concert performances. Stuart Dempster, Oliveros and others have explored the long natural echoes (over ten seconds’ duration) in old buildings and various underground spaces such as water reservoirs that have been temporarily emptied (e.g. for cleaning). Max Eastley began to build whirled instruments (like theBullroarer) from 1978, assembling with the group Whirled Music over 200 appropriate instruments and sounding objects. Llorenç Barber composes town-wide church bell pieces that involve groups of performers.
A different approach is found in permanent or semi-permanent sound environments based on multiple tape recordings (often in the form of tape loops or cassette tapes), digital recordings, radios, gramophone recordings or electronic sound-generating devices. Sculptures and environments of this type by Lucier, Michael Brewster, Max Neuhaus, Seawright, Christina Kubisch and others have been set up in airports, train stations, banks, streets, pedestrian and road tunnels, at busy traffic intersections and other locations.
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H. de la Motte-Haber: Musik und bildende Kunst (Laaber, 1990)
J.-Y. Bosseur, ed.: Le sonore et le visuel: intersections musique/arts plastiques aujourd'hui(Paris, 1992), 63–72
R. Sutherland: ‘An Introduction to Sound Sculptures’, First Annual Festival of Experimental Music (London, 1992) [4 pp., unpaginated; festival programme book]; rev. as ‘Sound Sculptures and Invented Instruments’, New Perspectives in Music (London, 1994), 234–41
D. Buchholz and G. Magnani, eds.: International Index of Multiples from Duchamp to the Present (Cologne, 1993)
D. Cope: New Directions in Music (Madison, WI, 6/1993), 98–105, 178–83
R. van Peer, ed.: Interviews with Sound Artists Taking Part in the Festival ECHO: the Images of Sound II (Eindhoven, 1993)
H. Davies: ‘Das Schlagzeug in Klangskulpturen und Klanginstallationen’, Inventionen '94 (Berlin, 1994) [festival programme book], 23–6
H. Davies: ‘Sound and Art’, The Dictionary of Art, ed. J. Turner (London,1996), 96–9
B. Hopkin: Gravikords, Whirlies and Pyrophones: Experimental Musical Instruments (Roslyn, NY, 1996) [incl. CD]
H. de la Motte-Haber, ed: klangkunst, Akademie der Künste Berlin, 9 Aug – 8 Sept 1996 (Munich and New York,1996) [exhibition catalogue; incl. CD]
J.-Y. Bosseur: Musique et arts plastiques: interactions au XXe siècle ([Paris], 1998), 258–79
B. Hopkin: Orbitones, Spoon Harps and Bellowphones: Experimental Musical Instruments (Roslyn, NY,1998) [incl. CD]
F. Baschet: Les sculptures sonores: the Sound Sculptures of Bernard and François Baschet(Chelmsford, 1999) [incl. CD]
J. Iges, ed.: Hotsaren espazioa: begiradaren denbora/El espacio del sonido: el tiempo de la mirada, Koldo Mitxelena Kulturunea, San Sebastian, 29 July–25 Sept 1999 (San Sebastián, 1999) [exhibition catalogue; in Basque, Eng., Sp.; incl. CD]
D. Kahn: Noise, Water, Meat: a History of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge, MA, 1999)
H. de la Motte-Haber: Klangkunst (Laaber, 1999)