Quotes on Sound Art

Sound art. I find it a useful term. But why? I apply it to the pieces I make using electroacoustic resources, and which I intend to be presented in galleries, museums, and other places in which sound is, increasingly, conceived of as a medium per se, like video, lasers, but not as performance. —Annea Lockwood

When faced with musical conservatism at the beginning of the last century, the composer Edgard Varese 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 decades” 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”... —Max Neuhaus

I think it is in sound’s nature to be free and uncontrollable and to go through the cracks and and to go places where it’s not supposed to go. —Christian Marclay