Trained as a child on piano and guitar, and having played in a number of punk bands, Naama Tsabar focuses on analysing and deconstructing the codes of amplified music and the power structures at work within it. Working from a strong feminist perspective, she is particularly interested in the visual and aural culture of rock and the gender stereotypes associated with this predominantly male music scene.

Stranger takes as its starting point an instrument created by the artist: a double electric guitar, consisting of two instruments connected back to back, which can be used by two performers. The performers are not placed in a position of authority – as is the dominant and solitary image of the guitarist on stage at a rock concert – but in a closeness necessitated by the very shape of the instrument, which forces its players into a constant negotiation. Initially showing the artist playing this counter-intuitive instrument alone, the video then focuses on the four hands that activate it, leaving in turn her collaborator, the musician and sound engineer Kristin Mueller, alone. The mirroring effect of the brushed metal on the instrument is echoed in the positions of the performers' bodies, facing each other, intermingled, pushing one way and then another, at times seeming to merge into a single person, always with their backs to the audience.

Philippe Bettinelli
 

Trained as a composer, Oliver Beer has spent the past two decades developing a multifaceted body of work, using a variety of objects, materials and performance devices to compose music, as in his 2007 Resonance Project, in which he uses the resonance of empty buildings to create vocal performances with architecture. Drawn scores, montages of found films and installations composed of frequencies captured in the cavities of old objects are all exploratory aspects of his work. Beer’s artistic research investigates sound as a conductive element of affect, traversing the memorial traces of what is “already there”.

Realised with the participation of schoolchildren from the south of France, Reanimation 1 (Snow White) is one of a series of films that reinterpret classic American cartoons made famous by their widespread distribution. For this project, the artist extracted the famous passage from Walt Disney's first animated film, Snow White (1937), in which the heroine bakes a pie for the dwarf Grumpy. Wistfully singing “Someday my prince will come”, she is suddenly paralysed with fear at the sight of the wicked Queen, disguised as an old woman, at her window. The artist isolated each frame of this sequence, removing the colours, then sent prints of the unique images to young students in Nice. They made 500 drawings, re-imagining and hand-colouring the scenes, which the artist then reassembled into new sequences. The result is a joyous disorder that defies naturalism and fully reveals the children’s creativity and freedom of expression. For the soundtrack, Beer also reworked the original song, translating it into over ten languages. If the hypnotic dramaturgy of the Disney Studios is characterised by the illusionistic synchronicity of image and sound, the breakdown of this symbiotic continuity reflects the multiple sensibilities of the audience and reveals the unsettling strangeness that pervades all fairy tales. 

M.L.

Wang Changcun, also known as ayrtbh, is a pioneering sound artist from China who uses computers to create artworks and performances. He masterfully manipulates natural, artificial and machine-made sounds using software, the internet, and computer-generated electronic technologies to create serendipitous and unexpected causalities for modern listeners.

Through coding, Wang modulates the relationships between people and objects with an understated yet sardonic sense of humor. He employs electronic sound technologies to transform the listening experience, allowing for the redefinition and learning of perceptual habits. For example, he once released a solo piano album called The Klone Concerts, whose title, cover design and acoustics were all parodies of Keith Jarrett’s legendary jazz album of solo piano improvisations, The Köln Concert. Wang claimed that the album had been recorded in a concert hall, but in reality, it was simulated by a random collage of computer algorithms. Wang later released Iterator, an album consisting of 100 tracks generated by running the same program 100 times.

In 2013, Wang created two works that echoed each other at Colgate University in New York: Cicada and Waterfall. Cicada used electronic devices to broadcast the resonant chirping of summer cicadas, making the winter woods of New York echo with humid tropical sounds. The concept of this dislocated and superimposed reality was then repeated in Waterfall, an installation in which Wang stacked six vertically arranged old-fashioned television monitors and played the pepper-and-salt noises they generate when no signals are received. At first, viewers may mistake them for the loud white noises emanating from the television sets, but on closer listening, it sounds more like a cascading waterfall in nature. From a listener’s perspective, the screens and snow sounds could create an artificial waterfall scene. It is worth noting that Wang used field recordings for the sounds in both pieces. While viewers can comprehend Waterfall in the context of Nam June Paik's concept of video media or of glitch art, the rabbit-duck-illusionist ambiguity and tension it creates may be even more interesting to explore.

Amy Cheng

In the 1970s, Gary Hill, one of the second generation of video pioneers in the United States, developed a series of experiments in which he used sound signals to generate images on the cathode ray tube monitor. At the time, the possibility of real-time “translation” offered by electronic technology inspired many artists.

Full Circle is a single-channel video that combines three images on a single screen. The work presents a performance that is simultaneously vocal, sculptural and videographic. A close-up shows the artist’s hands bending a copper-clad metal rod into the approximate shape of a circle, while his voice attempts to stabilise the sound [o]. A sine wave oscillator visually translates the vocal frequencies, providing a test image of the constancy of the sound, which remains regular despite the physical effort required by his action. Originally used to test the distortion of audio signals produced by high fidelity equipment, here it enters a feedback loop that intimately links the body and technology and involves the physical creation of a form, vocal emission, conductive materials (such as copper) and the abstract visualisation of sound. “This work tries to make manifest the perhaps irreconcilable space between the body as physicality and conceptual models built upon the ephemeral, yet also physical, media” , explains the artist.

Trained as a sculptor, Gay Hill first saw video as a way of exploiting the sonority of his material. His work was soon enriched by fundamental research into vocalisation and language. In contrast to linear, cinematic time, he sees video feedback as a process analogous to that of thought, in which “vocalisation was a way to physically mark the time of the body through utterance – the speaking voice acting as a kind of motor generating images.”  

In Full Circle, the artist establishes an equivalence between the performative act and the closed circuit of video. He shows the fragile synchronisation between voice and gesture within the electronic information network. The third image captures the action in a wide shot: it has been stylised in the form of a black-and-white negative to achieve a graphic abstraction. In this way, the electronic image, the antithesis of the documentary image, is revealed for what it is: a field of frequencies traversed by tensions.

Marcella Lista
 

Emmanuel Lagarrigue is a visual artist, sculptor, composer and director who explores different forms of language and transforms them through the prism of memory and experience.

I never dream otherwise that awake (2006) is an immersive multimedia installation that explores the traces of language and collective memory linked to our inner lives. Songs that are hummed and deconstructed, underpinned by electro-acoustic vibrations, reveal a soundscape bathed in a blue hue evocative of dreams and self-abandonment.

The blue colour, emitted by neon lights, forms horizontal broken lines that guide the spectator's path through eight columns of crystal-coated audiovisual cables. Small loudspeakers hang from these cables, their membranes exposed like the eight voices we hear, fragmented by meticulous cutting and collage. These male and female voices, each performing an original musical composition, blend together, inviting the audience to listen, to become one with and to interact with each other. Added to this acoustic phenomenon is a second, spatialised musical composition from loudspeakers placed around the perimeter of the auditorium, amplifying the meaning of this sonic experience.

This sensory space also suggests another language, that of the poetic word, which recalls the words of Maurice Blanchot: "In the poem, language is never real at any of the moments through which it passes, for in the poem language is affirmed in its totality. Yet in this totality, where it constitutes its own essence and where it is essential, it is also supremely unreal ."

Sylvie Douala-Bell

Both in their teaching and their art, Michel Bret and Edmond Couchot were prominent figures in digital creation in France. The latter turned to this field after a career as a painter; in the 1960s, he produced luminokinetic paintings that reacted to musical compositions of his own choosing. The former began developing computer programmes in the 1970s, from which he created a large body of works in motion.

In 1988, in collaboration with Marie-Hélène Tramus, they created their first interactive work, which featured the image of a feather floating in the air in response to the viewer's as they blew into a microphone. Two years later, they continued their research using an analogue device: the pistils of a virtual dandelion were released in response to the visitor's breath. This work evolved into Les Pissenlits (Dandelions), with the increase in computer power allowing for the simulation of several plants simultaneously. The images produced in this work are not pre-calculated but generated in real time based on the intensity of the blowing, making them unique to each viewer. As Couchot explained, "The image’s life may depend on a single breath. But in that breath, it also gains the power to be reborn elsewhere, differently, ultimately becoming more than just one image.”

Philippe Bettinelli

As a sound artist, Ye Hui uses a variety of media (installation, performance, video) to question the social identity of the individual and its entanglement with different cultural and political contexts. Her work focuses on the socio-political aspects of the act of listening, exploring the connections between sound and various social phenomena in contemporary societies.

In this installation, Ye Hui used a rotating motor to move magnets attached to an acrylic glass bar. Pharmaceutical bottles filled with pins are placed on the underside of an acrylic panel. The movement of the magnets briefly pulls the pins upwards before they fall back to the bottom of the glass bottles, creating a gentle percussive sound. As the title suggests, It was so quiet that the pins dropped could be heard... requires attentive listening and quiet reception on the part of visitors if they are to perceive the full subtlety of the sounds generated by the work. The artist, explaining the origin of her project, states: “The installation was inspired by the idiomatic expression 静可闻针, which specifies a listening situation within absolute quietness so one could even hear a pin drop. On the other hand, such kind of quietness probably only exists in one's imagination and the idioms 静可闻针 is indeed the description of a (collective) perception of not only acoustic, but also psychological condition. Therefore, the installation can be understood as the physical amplification of the linguistic/idiomatic expression 静可闻针.”

Nicolas Ballet

Sun Wei is a sound and field recording artist whose work explores the diversity of auditory frequencies and the relationship between acoustic vibrations and the environment. His works include ultrasonic recordings of nature, underwater frequencies and the background noises of everyday life.

In Sound Temple, the artist questions the way in which sound enables individuals to access spirituality, observing how the sonic context distinguishes the temples of Taiyuan, Shanxi Province, from those of other cities. Sun Wei shows how the temples of the schools of different cultural systems and the sounds that surround them reflect the contrasts between the technological frenzy of cities and the atmosphere created by religious cultures. This installation presents a transformed version of sounds collected online at different frequencies (256 Hz and 432 Hz) that generally characterise the modulations heard in temples that invite meditation. This work projects the sound composition of a building through space, architecture, environment and individuals. The viewer wanders through three structures before perceiving the sounds emanating from each. The field explored by Sun Wei is both tangible and intangible, reconstituting a “sound temple”, an imaginary interior created through an immersive experience.

Nicolas Ballet

Following in the footsteps of John Cage, who expanded the field of music to include all sounds, without hierarchy, Bill Fontana developed his own concept of sound sculpture in the late 1960s. His work takes as its starting point the amplification of our ability to listen. To this end, he uses powerful vibration sensors to reveal and compose sounds that are inaudible to the naked ear. Working on specific sites, the artist is interested in what today’s soundscapes have to say, in this case about the impact of human activity on the environment.

Silent Echoes in the Dachstein Glacier entails a double displacement. The first is to reproduce the sound of the bells of Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris in an ice cave in the Dachstein, a mountain range in the Austrian Alps. This first work can only be heard in situ, in the cave itself. Visitors are surprised to hear the sound of bells mixed with the dripping and cracking of the melting ice. But if they listen carefully, they can also perceive in these resonances the sounds around the cathedral that make the bells vibrate, and that they pick up without being aware of it: sirens, engine noises, birdsong…. Through them, a whole world is shifted into the Dachstein cave, and in the end,the two places are intertwined or coexist. To capture these sounds, Bill Fontana attached seismic accelerometers to the bells – which fell silent after the cathedral burned down in 2019 – that are sensitive to the slightest vibrations that pass through them, in a sense turning them into ears.

The second displacement captures this strange interweaving and projects it elsewhere, to a third place, in this case the façade of the West Bund Museum. This experience is entirely different. Passers-by or visitors to the museum will no longer hear one place in another but two places that have become a single continuum of sound, which they will only be able to distinguish if they take the time to analyse the surrounding image. In the heart of a melting glacier, bronze ears echo the sounds they heard in the middle of a big city. One place against another, which it is up to the listener to (re)reconcile.

Bastien Gallet
 

Over the past two decades, Susan Philipsz’s work has explored the sculptural and emotional qualities of sound, creating subtle resonances between past and present. Intended for both indoor and outdoor spaces, The Cuckoo's Nest is presented here in a room at the West Bund Museum, after being created in a room at the Isabelle Bortolozzi gallery in Berlin and then installed in the Sapporo Art Park, a sculpture garden on the island of Hokkaido, Japan. 
Six speakers arranged in a circle play the voice of artist and singer Susan Philipsz, who sings “a cappella” the six parts of a thirteenth-century English rota, “Sumer is icumen in” – which could be translated as “Summer has arrived”. Written in Middle English, this canon can be performed by four or six voices, depending on the vertical arrangement of the original score, with the different parts following each other continuously. Its “instructions”, which appear on the wall label, begin with the words: “Four companions may sing this round, but not less than three.” It is a canon, a polyphonic (and contrapuntal) form in which the melody sung by the first voice is then imitated by the others, each entering at a later time until they all overlap. For The Cuckoo’s Nest, Susan Philipsz recorded all the parts herself and projected them through six speakers, each corresponding to one of the voices in the round, taking the principle of imitation to its extreme. The text celebrates the arrival of the new season, inviting the cuckoo to sing and buds to blossom. The circumstances in which this piece was originally sung remain unknown, but it clearly had a ritual and collective dimension. Here, the work evokes a folk dance, the sound of which invites us to move around the exhibition space.

Bastien Gallet