Even though the term sound art was not used until the 1970’s, the idea of art that existed with or dealt with the sonic clearly started to take hold during the 20th century.
It seems obvious now that artistic practice would incorporate sound as a medium for expression, experimentation, and exploration; regardless of whether this was by visual artists who sought to break away from the confines of visual art artifacts, or musicians wanting to move beyond socially accepted notions of music.
This movement was greatly supported by advances in technology. The microphone, is in my opinion, the greatest technological change for music and sound art. The microphone is the instrument that allows us the ability to capture sound in order to amplify, dislocate from time, dislocate from space, and dislocate from location. The microphone, and the associated audio technologies that would follow from it, allowed us new possibilities of engagement with the sounds of our world; resulting in a fundamental change in our relationship to sound.
Technology is the key to the explorations of sound that we have seen during the 20th century. The two are intimately linked.
In particular, there are five broad categories of technology that have helped the expansion of sonic art; capture, creation, storage/transmission, manipulation, and reproduction.
The microphone is how we convert physical sound waves from our real world into electrical signals. The microphone is a class of transducer, which converts one type of energy into another.
The microphone is the key to capturing all of the various sounds of our real, physical world. Microphones changed how we related to the human voice by allowing for the intimacy of quiet speech to be amplified, or in allowing for the medium of radio, where we could transmit spoken words over large distances into listener’s homes. Microphones allowed for the capture of small sounds, as well the capture of symphonies and soundscapes. In the modern recording studio, microphones allow for artists to capture each individual instrument, so that a listener hears sound as though they are evenly spaced between all of the sounding voices in a work.
Technology also allowed for the invention of new means to create sound and music. Electronic instruments such as the electric guitar, Theremin, or Rhodes Piano opened up new types of sounds that people could compose with or use in the creation of sound art works. Likewise, synthesizers, which create sound synthetically either using analog oscillators or digital means, allowed artists and musicians to begin creating sounds that they could only imagine previously. These tools include examples like Moog and Buchla Synthesizers, or digital synthesizer environments like SuperCollider and Native Instrument’s Massive.
These synthesizers resembled the sound qualities of our modern world and inspired artists and musicians.
The ability to capture sound in a format that can be replayed at a later time or transmitted to another place also fundamentally changed our relationship to sound. Prior to these capabilities, sound was an ephemeral thing, that existed in a moment and a place, but could not be captured or reproduced. Technologies such as the radio, wax cylinders, magnetic tape, and later digital audio again broke society’s conceptions of what was possible with sound and audio.
It was truly significant that recording technologies allowed for the capture of sound that could later be played back. This meant that you could capture the voice of your loved ones, remove the barrier of the traveling to the concert hall, as well as capture for posterity the sounds of the world. Likewise, radio allowed for the spoken voice to be transmitted over large spaces, thereby increasing our ability to share information.
Tape was one of the first technologies that allowed for the manipulation of sound. As you have previously read, it could be split, spliced, reversed, or have the playback rate changed. In addition to the abilities offered by tape, engineers invented ways of mixing together multiple sounds at specific levels, placing them in the stereo field, as well as more sophisticated techniques like emphasizing or reducing specific frequencies, placing sounds in artificial reverberation, or changing the dynamic range of sound.
These capabilities offered artists and musicians the ability to manipulate sound in a similar fashion to how physical objects could be manipulated by humans. It made sound pliable, something that could be purposefully altered during its creation or after its capture.
The last, and equally crucial technology, is the opposite of a microphone, which is reproduction of electrical audio signals through speakers. Speakers are another type of transducer that converts electrical audio signals back into physical audio waves.
Speakers allowed for the reproduction of dislocated audio, be that through radio transmission or storage on a physical medium.