Sound Art is an artistic practice in which sound functions as a primary material rather than simply as accompaniment. It can include installations, field recordings, acoustic interventions, spatial composition and works that investigate listening, resonance, silence and the character of a place.
Beatriz Ferreyra entered the Groupe de Recherches Musicales in Paris in 1963 after hearing musique concrète for the first time. She later worked with Pierre Schaeffer on the Solfège de l’Objet Sonore, but her own description of those early years is refreshingly different from the mythology surrounding institutional electronic music. Ferreyra has said she arrived…
Stephen O’Malley’s Avaeken, released on 21 August 2026, did not begin as a conventional album. The music originated as a site-specific sound work created in relation to Banks Violette’s exhibition Wish You Were Here. O’Malley installed sound into the gallery environment, continuing a collaboration between the two artists that has repeatedly placed amplified guitar beside…
Maryanne Amacher did not simply compose sounds for rooms. She wanted the rooms themselves to behave acoustically. In her Music for Sound-Joined Rooms installations, she worked with sound transmitted through architectural structures, using walls, floors, corridors and connected spaces to shape what listeners heard and physically felt. Her own description is wonderful: rooms, walls and…
Taiwanese experimental composer Yang Cheng describes abandoning a conventional field-recording setup while travelling around Taiwan. Instead, he attached microphones to his palms and listened through his hands. That small technical decision completely changes the idea of recording a place for me. A normal field recorder encourages distance. Point the microphones toward an environment, remain quiet…
KMRU’s work repeatedly begins with recording environments. Joseph Kamaru has built compositions from field recordings gathered in Nairobi and many other places, treating apparently minor environmental sounds as material worthy of sustained attention. His practice has expanded into installations, performances and long-form ambient works in which place is not simply captured but reshaped through processing…
