Soundart and Notation

exhibition with notations, blog, performances, sound installation and discourse

Sound Art and Notation (curated by Jutta Ravenna)
The project Sound Art and Notation explores the question of which forms of notation exist in sound art practice in the age of digital and global public space. Works by artists such as Salomé Voegelin (Berlin), Eunice Artur (Lisbon), Juliana Herrero (Vienna) and Jutta Ravenna (Berlin), who are situated in the environment of notation, will be presented. In addition to breaking down authorship. Special attention will be paid to the diversity of their artistic strategies in spatially notated music, text scores, tactile scores or notations of audio walks. In an exhibition with notations, blog, performances and discourse, visitors will experience a broad spectrum of concrete examples from the current sound art scene, which also includes two sound installations.
Sound Art and Notation (10th- 20th March 2022)
Exhibition with Notations, Sound installation, Performance, Blog und Discourse in the Errant Sound Gallery
The project Sound Art and Notation explores the question of which forms of notation exist in sound art practice in the age of digital and global public space. Works by artists such as Salomé Voegelin (Berlin), Eunice Artur (Lisbon), Juliana Herrero (Vienna) and Jutta Ravenna (Berlin), who are situated in the environment of notation, will be presented. In addition to breaking down authorship. Special attention will be paid to the diversity of their artistic strategies in spatially notated music, text scores, tactile scores or notations of audio walks. In an exhibition with notations, blog, performances and discourse, visitors will experience a broad spectrum of concrete examples from the current sound art scene, which also includes two sound installations.
Notation as a fixation of sound stands in opposition to the processual character of sound art. Insofar the combination of sound art and notation poses a challenge. Recipients are not only involved as "readers" but as actors. Through participatory elements in the notation of sound art, the boundary between performers and listeners, music and interpreter is broken down.
In what form is the information of a notation communicated?
The diversity of digital signs, words, numbers or symbols is contrasted with analogue forms such as graphics on paper, material assemblages, three-dimensional objects, natural materials or land art exhibits conceived as music. This raises the exciting question of how the code of a "sound art score" reads.
Exhibition
The presentations of the notations within an exhibition allow the "reading audience" to heighten the sonic imagination. That is why some exhibits remain silent, while others will be heard and seen. In Juliana Herrero's work from one crystallon to the pampia, the room becomes a score, Salomé Voegelin's Soundwords creates dialogues in the blog or with other sound artists in paint your lips while singing your favourite pop song and invites active participation in text notations and invites active participation in text notations, and in Eunice Artur's series Partidura, action traces are frozen sounds of a performance with Jutta Ravenna and Marco Maria.
Panel
In a panel with the participating sound artists Eunice Artur (PT/Lisbon), Juliana Herrero (AUS/Vienna), Jutta Ravenna (GER/Berlin) and Salomé Voegelin (GER/UK) the following questions will be discussed:
"Where do participatory forms show up in the notation of sound art?"
"Which musical parameters and aspects are recorded in writing and why?"
"In which new contexts does notation appear in the age of the digital?"
Blog notation
Salomé Voegelin (GER/UK) is an artist and writer, working on listening as a socio-political practice. Her participatory approach is based on an online public sphere and on collaborative workshops that employ text scores as instruction and invitation. I write scores to get into conversation with human and more than human things, while staying by myself. I use words to trigger an exchange that includes, beyond words, the doing, listening and sounding to and with things. My starting point is private and intimate, quiet mainly if not mute, and felt rather than heard. From there the
speaking of words expands the feeling into doing, which as listening and sounding takes a contingent shape that meets that of others and other things, listening and sounding too. Thus on the basis of odd and private imaginations I start to make a shared racket and a space of things that narrate their own instructions. (Salomé Voegelin)
Soundwalk and notations
Immersive sound-walk-escapes
In her Partiduras (2020), the Portuguese artist Eunice Artur creates action traces of sounds with natural materials or carbon on paper during her LIVE performance. As relics of past performances, she visualises her subjective sensations during the sonic events in the form of drawing gestures. The artist, who has been dealing with the theme of wandering and migration for several years, processes what she hears during Soundwalks from the perspective of a walker into series of two-dimensional images on paper. Since 2020 Eunice Artur is developing with Bruno Gonçalves Immersive sound-walk-escapes. Wanderings. Some series of notations were produced due her soundwalks.
The room as a score
From One Crystallion to the Pampia
On the other hand, the Argentinean Juliana Herrero, who lives in Austria, is working with the space of the Errant Sound Gallery itself, for which she is designing a new work. Her spatial installation is belonging to the series of Sound Floating Landscapes. The artificial, floating landscape captures the original abstract composition (which is a crystalline sound aesthetic resulting from the moment-to-moment decompositions recorded during the weaving of the wire nets were recorded). Starting from this basic carpet sound, the acoustics of the materials are overlaid with new sound sequences in free play, the text files of various meta-scapes (digitally found materials) and others from my archive.
The transience of their possible realities will be subjected to the interplay with the reality of the space and the reflections of the audience.
and the reflections of the audience. Where the piece crystallises, a field of tension could between virtuality and physical reality, underlining various connections and and fosters different modes of production that are at the crossroads of cultures, languages cultures, languages and borderlines of disciplines, linking art and life.
The unfolding of "Partiture" into displaced fragments of material as flat
surfaces can expand the work into new musical readings that musicians can offered to musicians to provide possible interpretations or improvisations in situ. At the end, the dismantling of the work continues as a performance "Undo" until the piece has disappeared into into its component parts on the floor. (Juliana Herrero)
Notation as a haptic object
The reverse process of a not yet materialised work can be experienced in Jutta Ravenna's "Turned and rotated Music", a branch notation for cello, bass flute, bass clarinet and oscillators (Ravenna). A series of branch engravings found in the forest with traces of beetle grub will be taken in hand by the performers in the concert, twisted and turned, played blindly in phases, challenging the tactile sense of the players.
By "reading" the network of lines on the surface of the wood like a score, parameters are interpreted tonally. The loose arrangement of the branches in the space conveys to the players that the musical text is not to be understood as a firmly defined unit, but as an organic, open process that invites participation; as a music in the making that requires confrontation and debate. Before the concert, the branch notations will be presented silently in an installation in the gallery. (Jutta Ravenna)
Supported by the Federal Ministry of Arts and Culture Austria, Errant Sound e.V. and the Musikfonds

• Salomé Voegelin: »SoundWords« and "paint your lips while singing your favourite pop song" (vinyl)« ((2014-2022))
• Juliana Herrero: »from one crystallon to the pampia« sound floating landscape« ((2022))
• Eunice Artur: »Immersive sound-walk-escape« ((2022))
• Jutta Ravenna: »»turned and rotated music« a branch notation for cello, bass flute, bass clarinet and oscillators« ((2022))

Sound Art and Notation : In an exhibition with notations, blog, performances and discourse, visitors will experience a broad spectrum of concrete examples from the current sound art scene, which also includes two sound installations.