Big Noise, Embarrassing Silence: Why is no one talking about filmic sound in sculpture?
- Ellen Wetmore

Sean Langlais’ Untitled (Mills Gallery, Boston, 2003) is a cork stuck in the wall: so minimal as to be missed by many gallery visitors. When you remove the cork, a loud roar overtakes you, as if you had just let a very mean genie out of the bottle. Others in the gallery turn and stare. The contrast between the small, unassuming cork and the big noise is embarrassing. We are accustomed, aurally, to a sense of scale (small sounds for small things, big for big) and that custom is contradicted here in a surprising way. How does this work on us?
In thinking of sound and installation, consider how cinematic sound constructs a space. In narrative film, the sound designer combines dialogue, sound effects, and music to create a coherent environment. There are many technical and aesthetic effects: volume or reverb can indicate distance from the audience, panning can indicate direction of movement, ambient sounds can indicate an environment. It is up to the sound designer to choose the “right” sounds to characterize that space. Was that closing door heavy? Wood? Metal? Closed softly or loudly in anger? Did it have glass in the pane and did the glass break? Here we begin to describe not just a literal event but the psychological perspective as well. These sounds illustrating actions can fill us in on how characters are feeling or can trigger responsive emotions in us.
Typically the sound mix is subservient to the visual image and is meant to enhance it. How does filmic sound work in conjunction with objects in an installation? Since dialogue and sound effects are always created by something or someone, they have a concrete quality. This, along with our learned audio vocabulary, can introduce complimentary mental images and a visceral response to the audience experience of a sculptural installation. (I am purposely ignoring music here because the long tradition of musicians and musical sculpture is better addressed elsewhere.)
In “Blood in the Gutter,” Scott McCloud describes the process of closure as it relates to comics (Understanding Comics First Harper Perennial, 1994:68). The “gutter” is the missing link between two visual frames in a series of comic frames - for example in a murder sequence. He illustrates the scene: we see the victim in one frame, then we see a frame depicting a scream. As viewers, he writes, each of us is responsible for mentally describing (seeing) the victim’s fate: type of weapon, number of wounds, body position on the ground, amount of blood, whether there were any witnesses … Each person will have their own unique interpretation, attributing the cause of the scream to a different referent (in this case, a gruesome murder), and so the readings of the piece will multiply, one for every reader. The mental images caused by a sound will be different for every viewer, unlike the fixed physical aspects of a given sculpture. These evoked mental images influence our reading of the sculpture; we perform a closure where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
Physically, sound evokes still further mental images because we experience sound waves with our whole body, so our bodies call up related memories independent of images in the mind’s eye. We can’t close our ears or “look away” from a noise. Take for example Langlais’ cork and its big vacuum or jet engine sound. When we each individually first learned a similar sound we also would have experienced a host of related physical associations – taking off in an airplane or watching a big industrial machine. There was probably some fear and awe involved. Standing in front of the gallery wall, with a cork in your hand, and big noise in front of you causes you to revisit those other moments and link them to the cork and the gallery wall in front of you.
In “Stretching Sound to help the Mind See,” sound design pioneer Walter Murch writes that “the re-association of image and sound is the fundamental pillar upon which the creative use of sound rests and without which it would collapse.” Typically, our experience of sound is very visual: a person speaks and we watch them talk. A glass breaks and we look around for the fragments on the ground. Film theorist Michel Chion, in Audio-Vision, Sound on Screen, describes this process as “synchresis” or the mental fusion of a sound to an image when they occur at exactly the same time. We have learned a cause-and-effect language of sounds similar to our verbal and visual languages and this language can be subverted and re-created.
The best part is that this is already happening when we watch narrative films. Most sound effects are not literal samples taken from life to flatly illustrate what the filmmaker shows us onscreen. Often, one sound is substituted for another. As audience we do not typically stop in the middle of a film and ask ourselves: is that what a horse really sounds like or are those just coconuts being tapped on a table? Is that a fire burning or just a cellophane wrapper crackling? “The audience,” Murch writes, “is disposed to accept, within certain limits, these new juxtapositions as the truth.” And we will do the work to link the sounds and images together though the process of synchresis. Our brains will try to make sense of almost anything.
The potential dissonance between audio and visual material is a ripe artistic space to produce new meaning. Dissonance occurs when the sound we hear and the corresponding object (or film image) we see don’t match. Imagine if your dog meowed or a small parakeet spoke with gruff voice like Tom Waits. It would be an unusual, humorous, or surreal juxtaposition. Consider Magritte’s Key to Dreams. In a simple series of illustrations he assigns the “wrong” word to the image depicted. A bowler hat becomes “snow” and a glass is a “storm.” He uses a realistic illustration style (there’s no mistaking it - that shoe is not a moon!) to underline the mismatch between the word and image. It’s like a kid’s language book gone bad. Magritte’s gesture points out that language, both verbal and visual, is an artificial convention that we choose to agree to (or not). What he leaves for us to deal with is the anxiety of everyday signs and symbols failing, by which we mark rationality and sanity. Due to the customary substitution of one sound for another in a filmic sound mix, we’re asked to believe that a bowler hat really is snow. Sound incorporated into sculpture can achieve the same effect.
Oracle, by Robert Rauschenberg and Billy Klüver, 1965, (Centre Pompidou, Paris) is a series of sculptures meant, among many things, to mimic a walk on a summer evening in New York: apartment windows open, radios blaring. It was designed in one respect to re-create a physical and sonic space that the artists and their contemporaries would have been familiar with. The space is populated by modified found-object sculptures: a car door, a metal industrial pipe on a pair of bicycle wheels, a storm window. There is an urban familiarity to the carefully selected refuse. Within each object is an AM radio receiver; these are controlled by a central source and respond to audience manipulation at a central control sculpture. Note the choice of radio for the sound mix. Instead of mimetically illustrating the things they once were: cars, bicycles, storms, these sculptural characters enforce a re-association of sounds from radio airwaves to the objects in the installation.
Radio, with its constantly shifting tuning channels, is an illusive and always changing sound mix. Each audience member will learn, through synchresis, a different language of images and sounds. Presumably Oracle spoke largely English in New York 60’s radio-eese (and also music, commercials, static, talk shows, etc.), but now speaks contemporary, commercial French radio (being now housed at the Pompidou). The sculpture is 40 years old, but the radio voices will always be current (current news, music, and politics)– and the jarring effect this will have on an audience will increase as the stylistic age of the found objects becomes more pronounced.
At Mass MoCA in North Adams, MA, Ronald Kuivila’s Visitations is a sound art installation set outside the windows of a former production facility for the defunct Sprague Electric Plant. As we look over Sprague relics on a dusty, broken down factory floor, we hear former workers and townspeople reminisce about working there and what the shutdown meant to them and the town. The building “speaks” (literally, the speakers are installed on the wall, with eight channels of audio to discover) and takes us somewhere else in time. Visitations evokes nostalgia for lost jobs, lost identity, lost lifestyle, and, due to its use of interviews and news footage, also functions in a documentary capacity. The old building is fused to the voices and acquires their characteristics. We, as audience, agree to forget that sound is coming from the loudspeaker and that the visual is a separate entity in the space around us. We fuse the two; see them as one entity and that makes Visitations more evocative. In our minds, we bring the missing factory employees back to work. (* This is an example of Chion’s audio-visual contract.)
Janet Cardiff’s collaboration with George Bures Miller, titled the Dark Pool, 1995-6 looks like a messy lab or apartment that someone vacated suddenly. There are tables full of books on the paranormal, a single sleeping cot, a tray of dirty teacups and a book explaining how to read tea leaves; there’s a flapping bird wing, a book with a huge, bare speaker on it (making noise, of course); a chair between two giant old fashioned phonograph horns (they also transmit a message, very quietly); an old typewriter with a barely begun paper in it. The Dark Pool, supposedly named for a black pond where some bathers have been known to disappear completely (as if through a vacuum), is depicted in a diorama model in a trunk. Several objects in the room are locally mined with audience triggered sounds: detached, first person narrations, interviews as if from the news radio, random sound effects, piano music, a piece of “Somewhere of the Rainbow.” The samples of audio and the objects triggering and transmitting them bear no apparent relationship. There is no complete and simple explanation offered by any object or sound sample, so we play detective. We fill in the missing causal events ourselves.
The audience, Murch writes, can be brought to “bridge with their own imagination such an extreme distance between picture and sound that they will be rewarded with an even greater dimensionality of experience.” The question for installation artists is how evoke that dimensionality. For artists interested in the adventures of their audience, how else might this game, as Cardiff puts it, “ of constructing realities” be played? And who’s doing the constructing? What the audience gets will be different from the artist’s intent. How can an audience’s knowledge of a sound source add to the meaning of a sculpture? In film, the audience is rarely really informed about the sleight of hand happening in the studio, but if this were revealed in sound installation, what effects would it have? Sound functions invisibly and it can’t be fixed to an instant of time - sound is always diachronic- it will always seem ghostly for people who privilege their eyes over their ears. Sounds are hard to remember, or remembered only selectively, and easier to free associate. This makes it a riper medium with which to create a greater dimensionality of experience in sculpture.

Ellen Wetmore is a Boston-area artist and teaches at Fitchburg State College.