Steve's description of installations in which sound exists in a nonnarrative form, in such a way that the viewer can enter and exit at will, is fairly close to what I (following Bergson and Deleuze) am calling "duration." After all, this is how we live sound and time. This is how sound and time flow for us. Musical composition constrains sound and time within metric and structural parameters. There's nothing wrong with this, of course. But I think it does mark a very different experience of time.

Bergson's idea is that duration describes our primordial relationship to time. Indeed, he says, it is what time essentially is. Clock time—time spatialized, cut into discrete bits—is derivative. I think the same could be said about the relationship between the "nonpulsed time" of sound art and the "pulsed time" of musical composition (to draw on Deleuze's extension of Bergson). One of the things I value about sound-art installation is that it foregrounds this experience of time and sound.

I take Feldman to be saying something akin to this. Feldman is, of course, a composer of music. Yet I think he's also an important figure in the prehistory of sound art, precisely because he sought (in his own way) to free sound from music, and duration from time. A propos Anthony's comments about long-form pieces, Feldman's final pieces are notoriously long: five and a half hours, in the case of String Quartet II. About these last pieces, Feldman famously wrote: "Up to one hour you think about form, but after an hour it’s scale. Form is easy—just the division of things into parts. But scale is another matter. Before, my pieces were like objects; now, they're like evolving things." I think this quotation richly bears on a lot of what we've been discussing here.

Gulf of Akaba 00.16

I'd like to get back to some matters stated earlier here. But I also would like to discuss something that might be a bit boring to some: I'd like to circulate around the subject of form.

When I happened to get into a certain kind of music in the '70s, I remember that there were a couple of pieces that caught me: Stockhausen's orchestra piece Trans, the Peter Brötzmann Octet and their LP Machine Gun, and Fripp and Eno's No Pussyfooting. For a music consumer like me, this was stunning. The form of the music was not epic or ABA structured. It was shaped into a mass of sounds, an object. Not an object staying in one place but an object in motion. Readers of Deleuze/Guattari, etc., will, of course, recognize this rhizomatic flow; but from an exhibitional space–related (museum or living room) work it would be great to hear what you have to say about this. This is clearly what happened when I experienced Neuhaus's Times Square piece as well . . .

My apologies for missing most of the roundtable. Interesting issues seem to be emerging, though I haven't had the time to read the contributions in detail yet. What strikes me is that our perception and definition of sound art depends on where we come from. By that, I mean geographically, culturally, and in terms of our own personal development. Maybe this seems obvious, but it has a profound bearing on the way sound art is discussed. For example, there is the divide between music and everything else. Understandably, a lot of sound artists don't consider their work part of the music world, let alone the entertainment business, but that doesn't mean that the complex, interwoven history of musical sources for sound art can be discounted, or filleted for "undesirable" elements such as disco or free jazz.

My experience of many people in the visual-art world is that they have little interest in music, let alone knowledge of it, so judgments in relation to sound or musical significance can be pathetically out of shape. I think that Mike Kelley's idea of the dilution of art is ridiculous, but on the other hand, when certain art curators turn into born-again techno-bunnies, the consequences are embarrassing. At the same time, a lot of sound artists who began in music may have a limited view of visual arts. As an example of that, I'd suggest that a lot of contemporary sound work (think of Ryoji Ikeda, for example, or the near-silent school of improvisation) is closer to the "old-fashioned" work of visual artists such as Bridget Riley, Cy Twombly, Ad Reinhardt, Agnes Martin, and Robert Rauschenberg than it is to the post-'70s visual work that now dominates many contemporary art museums. This complete divergence of perspective ensures that there will never be the definitive book on sound art that Stephen is looking for. I know a few people working on such books right now, and I already feel annoyed, years before publication, about what I'm convinced they are going to produce, because I know how belligerently selective they are going to be.

In the end, I agree with Steve Roden: One of the great strengths of sound art is its hybrid nature, its elusive quality that constantly deflects snobbery, purism, and academic ring-fencing. I don't believe that space can be the defining characteristic of sound art, even though its importance is central. If you miss out soundscape recording or sound sculpture or conceptual works or any of the other strands of development within the field, then the picture is incomplete. I'm sorry that this is so thin . . . It's just one of those weeks.

Just a quick response: I definitely know that my connection to this definition of sound-in-space is simplistic; and by no means do I mean that it should apply for all artists and all directions. It has just been a useful reference for me personally. But when I think about soundscape and all that David is opening up, I still have space in mind, even if time is an undeniable factor as well. Ron Kuivila's new installation at Art in General—a time/space response to Cage's Ryoanji piece—is a very interesting piece that creates a space as well as a time-based network for each of the coexisting works. His use of time in the space is actually much more effective than the space itself.

In 2000, Max Neuhaus wrote a text that appeared as an introduction to P.S. 1's "Volume: Bed of Sound" show. I quote it at length here, not because I think it's right (I don't), but because I think it's rich, provocative, and bears on quite a number of things we've discussed here (the definition of sound art, what sorts of practices fall within its domain, the relationship between sound art and music, the competence of visual-art curators in dealing with sound, etc.).

Neuhaus writes:

Over the past twenty years there have been a number of exhibitions at visual arts institutions that have focused on sound. In the last five years their number has increased to the point of almost an art fad. Often they include a subset (sometimes even all) of the following: music, kinetic sculpture, instruments activated by the wind or played by the public, conceptual art, sound effects, recorded readings of prose or poetry, visual artworks which also make sound, paintings of musical instruments, musical automatons, film, video, technological demonstrations, acoustic reenactments, interactive computer programs which produce sound, etc. In short "Sound Art" seems to be a category which can include anything which has or makes sound and even, in some cases, things which don’t.

Sometimes these "Sound Art" exhibitions do not make the mistake of including everything under the sun, but then most often what is selected is simply music or a diverse collection of musics with a new name.

This is cowardly.

When faced with musical conservatism at the beginning of the last century, the composer Edgard Varèse responded by proposing to broaden the definition of music to include all organized sound. John Cage went further and included silence. Now even in the aftermath of the timid "forever Mozart decade," in music, our response surely cannot be to put our heads in the sand and call what is essentially new music something else—"Sound Art."

I think we need to question whether or not "Sound Art" constitutes a new art form. The first question, perhaps, is why we think we need a new name for these things which we already have very good names for. Is it because their collection reveals a previously unremarked commonality?

Let’s examine the term. It is made up of two words. The first is sound. If we look at the examples above, although most make or have sound of some sort, it is often not the most important part of what they are—almost every activity in the world has an aural component.

The second word is art. The implication here is that they are not arts in the sense of crafts, but fine art. Clearly regardless of the individual worth of these various things, a number of them simply have little to do with art.

It's as if perfectly capable curators in the visual arts suddenly lose their equilibrium at the mention of the word sound. These same people, who would all ridicule a new art form called, say, "Steel Art" which was composed of steel sculpture combined with steel guitar music along with anything else with steel in it, somehow have no trouble swallowing "Sound Art."

In art, however, the medium is rarely the message.

If there is a valid reason for classifying and naming things in culture, certainly it is for the refinement of distinctions. Aesthetic experience lies in the area of fine distinctions, not the destruction of distinctions for promotion of activities with their least common denominator, in this case sound. Much of what has been called "Sound Art" has not much do to with either sound or art.

With our now unbounded means to shape sound, there are, of course, an infinite number of possibilities to cultivate the vast potential of this medium in ways which do go beyond the limits of music and, in fact, to develop new art forms. When this becomes a reality, though, we have to invent new words for them. "Sound Art" has been consumed.

Thinking about when I first discovered that kind of time that Carl Michael von Hausswolff mentions, for me, was minimalist music. A friend of mine's father had tickets to see Philip Glass here sometime around 1980, and he couldn't make the concert, so he gave the tickets to us (we were in high school and deeply into the punk-rock scene here—where music = three minutes or less :-). I remember the concert starting and then I remember it ending and we had absolutely no concept of the fact that an hour and a half had happened in between—we literally felt like we were asleep the whole time and could remember very little about what we had just heard. It was a completely amazing experience in terms of time, because the repetitions induced this state where time completely disappeared. I suppose the space-related work that attempts to do this more than anything I've ever seen/heard is La Monte Young's "Dream House"—I never thought a small room in an apartment building with carpet and a few speakers could transport you so easily!

In regards to David Toop's posting regarding people in the art world's lack of interest in music—I am still surprised that although I would say most artists I know do have an interest in music, it's such an extremely conservative interest. Something seems wrong when I visit other painters in their studios and am hit with music my mom listens to—Anita Baker recently pumping out the stereo of an artist my age seems crazy.

The interesting thing in terms of recent sound work relating to "old-fashioned" visual art is that a lot of these relationships are not accidental. It seems that a lot of sound artists/composers are attempting to link their works to visual artists they view as working similarly—Rothko, Bridget Riley, and Agnes Martin are mentioned as inspiration on many of the Internet sound lists as much as Cage, Feldman, and even Autechre. As much as I'm surprised by a young painter listening to Anita Baker, likewise it is really strange that someone who makes music on a laptop, reads Japanese manga, listens to Squarepusher, and has an Xbox has so little knowledge of (or real interest in) contemporary art.

A nice exception is the series of LPs that Robert Meijer has been producing in Germany under his Bottrop-Boy label as the En/Of series. He asks a contemporary visual artist to create a multiple and pairs it with an audio work by a sound artist/composer/musician. I think the majority of projects pair a sound and visual artist who did not know of each other's work before the project. The nice thing is that I would guess most people who buy these are coming from one interest or the other. But connecting the two cultures in a somewhat informed way seems quite rare to me.

I would like to go back to Christoph’s invocation of Mike Kelley’s article “An Academic Cut-Up . . .” Whether or not one agrees with Kelley’s particular stance with regard to techno, the points he raises are important in considering the contemporary role of sound and/or music in the museum. Through a series of often unexpected connections (deriving from Kelley’s earlier work), Kelley’s article dialecticized the reception and meaning of a certain music—Kraftwerk versus contemporary electronica and techno—and a certain technology—turntables, magnetic tape, and digital recording and sound manipulation—as well as relevant historical and institutional aspects of contemporary sound, sound art, and their reception. Although Kelley was also reacting to what he saw as an uncritical importation of music as entertainment within the museum, his article also resonated with the Pompidou's mobilization of IRCAM and the legacy of electronic music to legitimize a national claim to techno as, essentially, a museum-worthy art. It’s only one of the ways that the history constructed around sound art impacts its present understanding.

Perhaps more important, however, Kelley’s position derived from and pointed to a critical post-Conceptualist legacy of allegorically dealing with art and music that runs through the work of himself, Dan Graham, and others. Graham’s video Rock My Religion hasn't yet come up, but I think it has to be counted as one of the most significant touchstones for contemporary artistic practices that deal with music. Anthony has already mentioned this line of development, and Steve Roden has commented on it as well, but I think more stress could be put on the type of dialectical strategies that Graham and Robert Smithson pioneered in what Smithson characterized as the “site”/“non-site” relation.

On a panel I was on at the Whitney Museum a while ago, Graham stated in no uncertain terms that he thought rock music and rock bands should not be brought into the museum. This may seem paradoxical, given Graham's evident alliance with popular music; however, when Graham places a video of a Minor Threat concert in the museum it is precisely as a marker of a sort of absence: The museum is the non-site to the punk concert’s site. Although Kelley’s discussion of techno in the museum reflects his own particular taste (he says as much), it also reflects his commitment to such critical, dialectical practices. This is not something that needs to be in every form of legitimate or even critical sound art, but it is, I think, an important lineage of contemporary art practice.

It is not the same perspective that I would necessarily take to practices that deal with sound as an almost sculptural presence. Although these seem to have a more modernist lineage—and a relation between them and earlier painting has been brought up here and elsewhere (e.g., Bernhard Günther’s “Monochrome White”)—I think they ultimately derive from the Minimalist phenomenology instantiated in Young and Zazeela’s “Dream House” installations mentioned by Steve Roden and in the Theatre of Eternal Music. We have not so far discussed what types of questions need to be brought forward to examine, evaluate, and understand these works within a contemporary social, cultural, and possibly political framework.

One area from which I might begin to approach them (and which goes back as far as the ambient investigations of Satie, Cage, and others who were brought up earlier by Christoph) is in the current environmental uses of sound. Although Cage was interested in ambient sound, he several times noted his dislike for Muzak. Muzak is, of course, only the most known of the many uses of sound as social pacification, the sculpting and shaping of an acoustical environment to effect a sort of control. Such a practice relates to space, time, and site: the three areas Christoph has mentioned as important to a thinking about sound art.

The other day, approaching a hotel to meet a relative, I was struck by anodyne pop music piped into the lawn by speakers concealed in trompe l’oeil rocks. Maya Lin, whose architecture so often refunctions and tames artistic strategies, is currently working on a project at UC Irvine that will include “whispering benches” broadcasting something called “audio art” but which seems to be anything from music to the reciting of folktales. This, obviously, does not question or disturb but rather collapses art and Muzak. It is thus not only in the realm of contemporary technology but also within these types of wider social and cultural contexts that current sound-art practices have evolved and should perhaps be examined. Whether or not artists are specifically thinking about them, these types of social uses of sound form one of many important backdrops. I guess my point is that defining sound art (whether or not the term has been “consumed,” as Neuhaus put it) is not as interesting to me as examining the implications of the various ways that artists interact with specific sonic or acoustical strategies in specific contexts, the museum being only one.