3. Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) - All submissions
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Item Sound art: space, time & Johannesburg(2021) Engelbrecht, B.J.This thesis begins with a chronological overview of sound and aurality. It focuses quite strongly on music and on how elements key to the emergence of sound art are present in the history of music. Some of the key themes are: space as a composed element in music, the use of non-musical sound and sound recording and playback. This is followed by a discussion of the emergence of sound art in the latter half of the 20th century and a critique of the definition of sound art based on Tierry de Duve’s aesthetics. Thereafter, the thesis provides a detailed look at the physical properties of sound and the biological mechanisms of hearing. Here, particular attention is paid to air and how a variety of physical and biological variables influence our perception of sound. The underlying theoretical claim is that one of the functions of sound art is to place the ordinariness of sound in context where a new awareness is created by ‘making it strange’ – sound art consciously connects us to our perception of the environment, time and particularly the ‘becoming’ of the present. Thus, the chapter that follows attends specifically to notions of auditory experience as evoked within the context of the soundscape of Johannesburg. Three variants of the soundscape of Johannesburg mediate the discussion: the city, the residential areas (leafy suburb and township) and the industrial zone. This is then followed by a series of case studies intended to suggest new ways of studying the soundscape of Johannesburg. In the final chapter, I provide an survey of sound art in Johannesburg and conclude by returning to the question of sound art and the experience of space and time itself.Item Sound art in Johannesburg: a critical review 2005-2009(2010-06-28T09:55:38Z) Engelbrecht, B.J.ABSTRACT In this dissertation I offer a critical review of ‘sound art’ in Johannesburg between 2005 and 2009. The term ‘sound art’ was coined by Dan Lander in 1989. According to Christoph Cox, Dan Lander’s lament that sound art lacked “any substantial discourse” in 1989 still applied in 2007. My intention in this research is to start such a critical discourse for sound art in Johannesburg. I argue that sound art is a distinctive practice in the city, involving the body politic and underground, surface and edge as characterised by Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nuttall in their recent major work on Johannesburg. First I briefly consider the history of sound art, referring to Brandon Labelle’s view that this history parallels that of site-specific art. I then suggest that the popularity of sound art under review became popular for a number of reasons; what Walter Ong’s termed “a shift in the sensorium”, the immediacy and inexpensiveness of working with sound, and the rise of the home computer. I also locate the sonic practices constituting sound art in audio culture as a whole, focussing on the structure, materiality, recording, playback and transmission of the sonic event in the sonic landscape. Sound, silence, noise and music are all part of this focus. I finally examine sound in terms of space, time, body and network in the work of Frances Goodman, Siobhan McCusker, The Trinity Session, Teamuncool, Gerhard Marx and my own sound work involving sampling, Happy Station (2008) and Slice Me Nice (2009).