Ray Lee's Siren

The Pages performing arts experience is Ray Lee's sound installation Siren. This work incorporates installation (a work of art you can interact with) and performance art (sound and performance of the spinning sound mechanisms). Ray Lee, the creator of this work, is an artist, composer, and performer and is generally fascinated with, "the hidden world of electromagnetic radiation and in particular how sound can be used as evidence of invisible phenomena."

You will visit the Wexner Center and physically experience a unique sound art work by Ray Lee. Please look to the right side of the page to find out more about Ray Lee's work and "sound art" in general. There are dozens of links that give you information into this art form. Please be prepared to discuss and explore for the classroom visits in February.

I will be teaching this portion of the program so I am excited to work with each and every one of you with this particular work of art. I look forward to seeing you soon.


Dionne Custer
Wexner Center for the Arts

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