Simply, Sound

"They say, "you mean it's just sounds?" thinking that for something to just be a sound is to be useless, whereas I love sounds just as they are, and I have no need for them to be anything more than what they are. I don't want them to be psychological. I don't want a sound to pretend that it's a bucket or that it's president or that it's in love with another sound. I just want it to be a sound."

-John Cage, Interview in documentary "Listen" (1992)

For Cage, sounds didn't need dressing up, placing in abstract musical frameworks, or melded into relationship with other sounds to create meaning. In another context he talks about sounds being simply enough, in the same way a mountain by itself is enough, to compell awe and amazement.

For the past few weeks, I've assembled all the collected recordings from the Big Idea and other communities, sounds of bedrooms hushes, touch typing, aircraft drones, conversation buzzing, and industrious creating - banal sounds, spectacular sounds, sounds which we strain to discern and others which envelop us.

All of these have been placed in the final website interface, which will shortly go live, an interface which I wanted as unassuming and straightforward as possible, so that the sounds could remain the focus: enough in themselves. As each space is activated, it's title and label disappears, leaving nothing to see, but much to hear.

As multiple spaces are activated, this connection becomes vague and fragile: is that car drone occuring in Auckland or Brussels? Beachhouses overlap with bedroom studios, a recording shed in Dunedin suddenly appears in the middle of a nature museum in Berlin. This confusion is one of the keys, our visual perception fails as we can't hold these spaces at arms length. Instead we're engulfed and left to the sounds, without labels and imagery, without motifs or melodies.

Simply, sound.

Image: Kasimir Malevich, Black Square, 1913