Pioneering Artists Aim to Push Through the Sounds Barrier

Dressed in all black, 32-year-old Japanese artist Kazue Mizushima moved across a sweeping lawn, between trees connected by taut silk strings that wire the landscape into something resembling a giant outdoor harp. With gloved hands, she plucked an acoustic “Bolero,” part of her original composition called “Eve of the Future.” The sound plinked into the air, aided, in theory at least, by paper cup amplification, as in the string-and-cup game of telephone.

It was nearly noon at the Falkirk Cultural Center in San Rafael, on Day Four of SoundCulture 96. For the past week and a half, at 33 venues around the San Francisco Bay Area, 118 “sound practitioners” like Mizushima have been exploring the universe of sound, which exists, according to Bay Area artist Paul DeMarinis, “at the periphery of new and experimental music, sculpture, interactivity, performance.”

“Sound,” explains festival director Ed Osborn, 32, “is a primary material, not an adjunct, not music.”

Osborn’s version of SoundCulture is the third biannual festival of sonic art. The first was in Sydney in 1991, the second in Tokyo in 1993. Dubbed “transpacific,” the ’96 festival has drawn artists and others from New Zealand, Japan, Canada and Australia. Radio broadcasts, live performances, installations and Internet sites are listed on its poster-sized schedule, along with panel discussions on topics such as acoustic ecology (the study of sound as a barometer of environmental and social health).

The artists’ idea, everyone seems to agree, is at least one part backlash. From a ship-horn symphony in Oakland Harbor to a sound walk through a Marin County mall to computer-generated voice mail, the components of the festival share one mission: to push the envelope of the sonic in a society whose visual metaphors have been exhausted.

“Sound art gives people who feel everything’s been done an opportunity to explore huge areas that are artistically untouched,” says Doug Kahn, who writes a column on experimental sound for the Sydney Review. Through a variety of media, it urges us to take our eyes off the movie of our lives and concentrate on the soundtrack.

“Sight,” says participating artist Ellen Band, 44, from Boston, “is a tyrant, it’s the Moral Majority. Sound is more primal.”

Despite an emphasis on the audible, SoundCulture manifests itself also in visual presentations.

Nigel Helyer, 44, a Briton who lives in Australia, designs sophisticated audio environments. “I work hard to make sure there are several hooks,” he says. “On average, people in a museum spend three seconds looking at a painting. Sound is temporal, so three seconds is nothing.”

Helyer’s two-level installation at the San Francisco Art Institute, “Silent Forest,” combines aluminum and zinc speaker horns with a grouping of tall aluminum abstract “trees.” The trees contain beakers filled with bonsai arrangements, and the horns, hung together like four enormous chandeliers, broadcast a 74-minute soundtrack, a mix of 78 nature recordings and a stylized version of an air-raid siren like the one that once sounded from atop the Hanoi opera house.

“It’s a project about silence and silencing--about the creation of ecological silence by a massive chemical intervention of Agent Orange in Vietnam,” Helyer says. “I worked hard to make it meditative, beyond documentary or an admonishment. Something that would hold people’s attention.”

Ellen Band’s work is more rigorously dedicated to pure sound. “Acoustic Mirage” is a “psychoacoustic” environment: Listeners in a blank room are invited to create “personalized acoustic imagery” by listening to a mix of sounds she calls pink noise. “People hear Tom Waits or opera, and it’s not in there,” she says. “Nothing sounds the same to anyone else.” Sound, like smell, triggers memories, she explains.

As with its relationship to visual art, exactly where sound art departs from music often appears to be a question of terminology.

Mizushima, for example, says she works with “the language of music.” She abandoned the piano five years ago to take up her “string telephone.” “The piano is an instrument that carries its cultural history. Music for the piano was perfected in a certain time in the past,” she says. “I couldn’t write [for piano] better than Beethoven.”

Festival director Osborn doesn’t call himself a musician, but he did get a master’s degree in music from Oakland’s Mills College. “I got tired of running up against the limits of what could be done in music,” Osborn says. “Music can evoke moods or states, but without adding text, it isn’t specific. And I was never good at dealing with text.”

In “Parabolica,” his entry in the festival, a model train travels randomly over tracks wired for various sounds, creating an ever-changing series of bells, whistles, words and more.

This sort of work doesn’t exactly attract big crowds. Many of the SoundCulture events, mostly preach to the choir--in this case, other sound artists.

“Sometimes audiences have to bear with us a little bit,” says Barbara Tischler, a cultural historian from Columbia University who gave a paper at the festival on sound-art pioneers John Cage, Jimi Hendrix and George Harrison. “They can’t tap their feet or sing on the way home in the car. It’s always going to be challenging for audiences who love Frank Sinatra.”

But for the initiated, the sonic is the wave of the future. Dean MacCannell, a professor of environmental design at UC Davis, describes sound art as an indicator of the experimentation that’s taking place through real and virtual travel and the global swapping of cultural practices. “It’s pure possibility at this moment in time, and I think almost everyone’s afraid of that. But the voice comes through no matter how hard you try to silence it.”

* SoundCulture 96, at various Bay Area venues, formally ends today, though many of the installations continue through April. Information: (510) 848-0124, Ext. 623.