Inside-Outside Space and Place: Sonic Thoughts, Tensions, and Trajectories

By Gautam Pemmaraju

This week we present an exclusive peek into an upcoming essay by Gautam Pemmaraju on “Sound Interventions”—a project curated by Sneha Khanwalkar at Serendipity Arts Festival 2019. The essay will be published as part of Projects/Processes 2019. 

A slow but inevitable foregrounding of sound in sensorial, material, and conceptual domains over the second half of the twentieth century, has unfolded in art, literature, and the humanities, not to mention popular culture. Often referred to as the ‘sonic turn’, a shifting of cultural markers and practices that the scholar Christoph Cox describes as “a broad turn in the academy and also in visual and sonic arts”, it carried with it the weighty legacy of a century of theory and practice, and in this period the plastic arts flourished and the conventions of music and musical performance were challenged vigorously by a wide range of stakeholders. Coined by Jim Drobnik, the phrase ‘sonic turn’ nimbly accounted for these shifts, shuffles, and shimmies, that were taking place in the late 1990s and the early 2000s. Across disciplines, scholars, practitioners and artists alike, were attempting to grasp sound beyond music, beyond object, beyond material; sound as a legitimate artistic ‘concern’; and the numerous other iterative descriptions, arguments, provocations, psychic animations, morphologies, typologies, and meanings even, that would extend our understanding of the auditory realm and the very many things contained within it and without. It was during this time the phrase ‘sound art’ began to come into vogue. With the sonic turn, scholarly debates also introduced a reconciliation of sorts with the conventional privileging of the visual arts, of text and image, of representation and fixity, leading to broader institutional change. Greater acknowledgement of sonic concerns would soon open up space for an area of study within the academy; curators and galleries began to embrace the idea of sound art shows; and the coincident collapse of the global music business in the early 2000s, the rise of digital technology, the internet and increasing connectivity, propelled a wider interest in sound beyond music and convention. At the heart though arguably, it is sound’s own nature that distinguished itself—its spatio-temporal characteristics, physical attributes, evanescence, potency of suggestion and signification, its immateriality even; these all surely pitched the growing regard for sound in a competitive counterpoint with the visual.

Traditionally there has been sparse attention to sonic matters as an artistic concern in India although, over the last decade there has been growing attention to sound art from curators, galleries, and art institutions. Even in popular culture and cinema, the visual has held sway over imagination and artistic production and sound beyond music has rarely been engaged with. In cinema specifically, the soundtrack was driven by dialogues, songs, and background music, in a hierarchical structure. This broad trend began to change in the digital era, as globalized connections allowed for more immediate creative exchanges and appropriation.

A welcome inclusion to the Serendipity Arts Festival 2019 programme was a set of artistic works included under the title Sound Interventions, which provide an opportunity for engaged enquiry. What is sound art? Is it art with sound(s)? Art that has something to do with sound? Is it even a legitimate artistic category? These contentious questions have for long troubled many, and consequently, many scholars, artists and others have grappled with them.

*To read essays from the 2018 seres of Projects/Processes, kindly visit the Amazon to purchase volumes 1 - 5.