Some quick thoughts, less articulated than all that has come so far, but things that came to mind as I read the various entries. As Steve was mentioning, the technology is more available than ever. Not only processing and editing technologies but also multichannel interfaces, consumer 5.1 systems, more complex systems such as Ambisonic. Charlie Morrow organized a workshop at the Kitchen this week on multichannel and spatialized sound. Alban Bassuet, an acoustic engineer, spoke of the military's investment in sound technologies (the use of binaural technologies in fighter planes and more).

Thinking more about the question of "why now," I would say that there is also the simple point that a few major institutions programmed important sound exhibitions four or five years ago: The Whitney with their "American Century" exhibition (1999–2000), the "Sonic Boom" show in London (2000), "Sound Art—Sound as Media" at the ICC in Tokyo (2000). Seeing that the public and press all responded so positively has inevitably created ripples into other institutions, who have either programmed sound into group shows of various media or have singled out sound shows that I think several of this group have already stated being wary of.

I'm interested in the wariness, expressed by Steve and others, about the "sound art" tag and about a conception of sound art that, focused on sound itself, is deliberately not multimedia. It seems to me that no one would worry about the fact that a drawing or a painting is solely visual. Why then worry about sound art that is focused on sound itself? On the other hand, it's worth noting that relatively few works of sound art have to do with sound alone. After all, it's a curious property of sound that it is powerfully shaped by the space it inhabits. Hence, sound has always been multi-media insofar as it is intimately bound up with architecture. Sound is also, of course, a temporal medium. So perhaps the turn to sound has something to do with some new relationship of ours to time and space?

In any event, Steve, Micki (von Hausswolff), Anthony, and Marina are right to point out that there is interesting and important work being done with sound in multimedia contexts and that it is perhaps silly to call such work "sound art" simply because it employs sound. The fact that sound has, relatively recently, become just another artist's tool is interesting in itself and brings us (yet again) back to the question: Why now? Micki suggests that this has to do with institutional considerations (the conservatism of music establishments, the poverty of alternative venues, the open-mindedness of art venues and curators, etc.). Stephen notes the role of a number of important and well-received sound-art exhibitions. Steve and Stephen note the role of technology (cheap sound software, etc.). I'd like to dwell a bit on this last point. I don't think it is accidental that the recent upsurge in sound-art activity is fairly precisely coincident with the emergence of digital technology: the Internet, the laptop, cheap and easily available sound-processing software, etc. Is this perhaps the determining factor?

Even if the answer to that question is yes, it's also intriguing to note that the recent fascination with sound has led to a renewed interest in figures who were working with sound well before the digital revolution of the '90s: artists such as Alvin Lucier, Max Neuhaus, Christian Marclay, Christina Kubisch, and others. Which leads me to open up another set of questions: Which historical antecedents are (or should be) particularly important for sound artists today? What lessons can (or should) be learned from these artists and movements?

Christoph, I totally agree. In no way did I intend to portray "sound as a category in and of itself" in a negative light or that it should rather be an "attendant" to other media. I am very happy that places like Diapason Gallery, for example, are doing what they are doing: focused on sound itself rather than how it might find its way into painting/drawing/sculpture etc. I was addressing the "why now" question, and I think that crossing (or challenging) disciplinary borders is something that the (visual) art world is very interested in; and so sound is emerging as a material that can play a newly energized role in articulating a broadened understanding of contemporary art at large. The art world today likes the "in between." But that certainly does not mean that the "only aural" is a fruitless thing to pursue. Quite the contrary. The work of all of the artists in this group testify to that.

I'd like to follow the historical thread Christoph raises. Again, what I think is fascinating is how experiments with sound fit into the history of Art. As several have suggested, the late 1960s and early 1970s, for artists of all media, are a crucial period to consider. In the visual arts, artists were drawn "outside the box" (of the white gallery cube). Robert Smithson, Dennis Oppenheim, Michael Heizer, Walter De Maria, Gordon Matta-Clark, Richard Long, etc., were working in fields, on piers, in the desert. Around the same time, we see Max Neuhaus moving "outside the box" (of the concert hall), stamping the word "listen!" on people's hands and leading them through the city, as his performance. He thought that Cage didn't go far enough, by having the idea behind 4' 33" remain inside the concert hall. Also, it's a time when art began to be not only outside but about the white-cube space, about a self-awareness of site, and the beginnings of artists thinking about the site-specific. In art, we notice Barry Le Va, Robert Morris, Fred Sandback, Robert Barry. And at the same time, we see Lucier's I Am Sitting In a Room, or La Monte Young dragging furniture across the floor of a loft—sound that is not about a score or about composition through time but about space, about mapping "the box." One of my favorites: Bruce Nauman's Get Out of My Mind, Get Out of This Room (1968), an empty white gallery where one hears the artist aggressively whispering that title—a great early sound-art piece, one that moves beyond sound-through-time and explores an awareness of space and site, through sound (and language). Including people like Lucier and Young, or Nauman's sound work, into our study of the history of art of that period can encourage curators and art historians to notice the common conceptual pursuits that were shared by artists working with art or with sound—which implies that sound should certainly be more present in museums and galleries, or venues that represent the history (or the now) of art practices.

Likewise I didn't mean to sound antagonistic about sound as a category in and of itself. There are some incredible artists, contemporary and historical, who use sound alone in a space and simply slay me. But I do have a problem with the camps that seem to develop through the idea that sound art must be a room with sound alone. I sat at a table with a group of card-carrying sound artists a few years ago where everyone was bitching about Documenta because there were works with sound but no "real" sound art. I don't think that having a visual element necessarily dilutes the audio (nor do I think that every sound work necessarily needs visuals). It depends upon the piece of course. I just meant that, for myself, I like the idea that it can be open—that a work can take left turns and be realized in a way that isn't dependent upon a kind of predetermined ideal of a medium. If broken plates can cover the surface of a painting and it is still a painting, why can't a work of sound art have other elements and still be primarily about sound or considered in relation to "sound art"?

In terms of my own work, I had a somewhat rigid approach to sound when I began to let it seep into my exhibition work. I felt that, if it was about sound and created of sound, there should only be sound in the space. Hence the first installations were simply speakers hidden, then speakers visible, and then slowly the visual aspect evolved to become a part of it. With the sound works the sound is still the thing of most importance; and I don't think the visuals get in the way or reduce the sound to a sound track or the work into sculpture with sound. But this is a fuzzy area, as I know there are folks out there who would disagree. Perhaps I'm simply not a purist at heart—and I like when seemingly disparate things collide.

In terms of historical figures or approaches related to visuals and sound, I think Alvin Lucier's Chambers and Christina Kubisch's work are very important in this regard because the visuals are not there simply as visual elements, but there is an integral relationship between what you are seeing and what you are hearing—not in the sense that the seeing dresses up the sound, but in the sense that there is an integrity there between the objects and the sounds you are hearing; and in some sense the visual is a doorway through which to access/experience the audio. Ultimately, I respond to works that have visuals that eventually fall away so that the audio is the thing one actually experiences and has the most intimate relationship with—for me, it is reduced down to the idea that sound art or sound works are about the activity of listening—or better, listening as an activity.

In terms of the "why now?" I wonder about the ease of acquiring software and equipment to make this work, and if its influence on younger artists is simply through access to the medium itself. Could it also be through the fact that a lot of bands are visibly interested in musique concrète, Krautrock, Cage, avant-garde, etc.? I wonder if it isn't the cues taken from Sonic Youth, Stereolab, Spacemen 3, Merzbow, etc., that are sending younger artists toward the musical avant-garde through the back door (many of the grad students I work with have just recently discovered this stuff through Sonic Youth's Goodbye 20th Century). It does seem that along with a proliferation of sound in art, there is also a lot of visual art coming out of band and/or DJ culture or even bands participating in art culture with things like Black Dice, or visual artists working with music, like Stephen Prina or Rodney Graham. Could it be that sound art is finally OK with hipsters instead of just geeks :-) A scary thought! You can also see this in post-techno, laptop, microsound, or whatever you want to call computer-based electronic music of the last eight years or so.

I think Anthony has hit it on the head in terms of the possibility of common conceptual pursuits as opposed to simply being influenced by sound-art history—I think many of us have taken cues from the seminal works from the '60s and early '70s that Anthony mentioned—as well as a lot of the early works both Christoph and Branden mentioned. For me the list is a long one but would definitely also include William Anastasi's work, the early works of minimalism (Steve Reich's Come Out and Pendulum Music), Terry Fox's work, Tom Marioni's drum-brush drawings, Sol LeWitt's early cube pieces, Tinguely . . .

I'm often frustrated that there isn't one really good book on sound art (however we are each defining it); but maybe, considering this conversation, it is actually valuable that there hasn't been one overriding text. Perhaps the merging of all of these histories into various cultures is actually that much more possible because it is seeping in from so many directions.

Adding to the lists of histories, Vito Acconci comes to mind at the moment. He has something like seventy audio pieces, some of which are meant to function purely as audio but many of which are specific to objects and buildings. His current show at Barbara Gladstone has an amazing five-channel sound work from 1971 or '72, and at least one more stereo piece.

I think Steve Roden is absolutely right to note that the contemporary interest in sound art derives as much from developments outside the art world as inside it and is not solely attributable to technology. As a technology, for instance, the turntable is not new, but it is a privileged material for artists like Christian Marclay, Philip Jeck, and Melbourne’s Michael Graeve. I think the 1990s’ massive hyping of grunge produced a sort of “anything but ‘indie’ rock” attitude in many people that opened up a whole range of other areas, including not only Krautrock and the avant-garde but American roots music (the Harry Smith Anthology), free jazz, and so on. It’s enough to note how much of the recovery of formerly neglected musical and artistic precedents has been done by independent record labels like Table of the Elements and Ampersand. I don’t think that aspect of the current art scene can be underestimated.

When we look at historical precedents within art, however, I think it is important to keep in mind not just the diversity but the very different trajectories and goals that artists using sound pursued. Acconci, Fox, Baldessari, and others were coming out of Conceptual art, which subordinated the medium or material of the artwork to the idea or strategy being investigated. Sound was one way of pursuing what Lucy Lippard so famously called the “dematerialization of the art object.” These types of Conceptual investigations obviously distinguish themselves quite clearly from any notion of modernist medium-specificity or the investigation of sound as such. It would be interesting, but probably ultimately insufficient, to try to separate, say, Acconci’s sound production from his video and performance works. The connecting point would probably be something like Bruce Nauman’s Record, which made sound into a form of sculpture—or, rather, recoded the record album as a multiple—but also intimately related to his film and video pieces using the violin (all of which was responding, in part, to the violin and viola of Conrad and Cale in the Theatre of Eternal Music). This Conceptual or post-Conceptual trajectory both relates to and differs from the equally Conceptual-related work of Mike Kelley and Tony Oursler’s The Poetics, Art and Language and the Red Crayola’s albums, and the “General Acognitive Culture” work of Henry Flynt, to name just a few.

If the one really good book on sound art that Stephen Vitiello envisions ever did appear, I would hope it would investigate these types of historical genealogies—not to isolate or regulate the mixing available to contemporary artists, but to begin pointing to the important critical and historical stakes that such practices have pursued and continue to pursue.

Just returning to the two things I brought up earlier. Regarding technology, one thing I have encountered, especially when visiting schools, is that a lot of students have turned to audio software after learning to use video software. The similarities in the interfaces, graphically, etc., have actually facilitated a comfortable switch into sound. It's an interesting switch—looking at the early history of video processing, where a lot of people came to video after using audio synthesizers.

Also, the issue of venues, museums, but also spaces such as Diapason (and Studio 5 Beekman before it) and Engine 27: An enormous amount of work has been created because of the opportunity of somewhere to present it. Similar to Charlotte Moorman's Annual Avant-Garde Festival, New Music America, the early days at the Kitchen: Having a place to present the work and a community to share it with has been a gigantic motivating factor. Similarly for CD-R pieces: I know that a great deal of music was made because Anomalous Records existed as a distribution possibility (while it lasted!).