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1.
Introduction
Sound art holds the distinction of being an art movement that is not tied to a specific time period, geographic location or group of artists, and was not named until decades after its earliest works were produced. Indeed, the definition of term remains elusive. Bernd Schulz has written of it as 'an art form ... in which sound has become material within the context of an expanded concept of sculpture ... for the most part works that are space-shaping and space-claiming in nature' (Schulz 2002: 14). David Toop has called it 'sound combined with visual art practices' (Toop 2000: 107). The glossary of the anthology Audio Culture describes it as a 'general term for works of art that focus on sound and are often produced for gallery or museum installation' (Cox and Warner 2004: 415). Bill Fontana has referred to his sound installations and real-time transmissions as 'sound sculptures' but that term has also been applied to sound-producing visual works by Harry Bertoia, the Baschet Brothers, and many others. Unlike music, which has a fixed time duration (usually calculated around a concert programme length, or more recently the storage capacity of LP, tape, or compact disc formats), a sound art piece, like a visual artwork, has no specified timeline; it can be experienced over a long or short period of time, without missing the beginning, middle or end.
2.
Recent exhibitions and difficulties in curation and presentation
The term itself dates back to William Hellermann's SoundArt Foundation, founded in the late 1970s, which produced a 1983 exhibition at the Sculpture Center in New York, Sound/Art. It gained currency in the mid- to late 1990s, when I first heard it, starting perhaps with the first Sonambiente festival in 1996, culminating in three important shows in the year 2000: Sonic Boom: The Art of Sound, curated by Toop at the Hayward Gallery in London; Volume: A Bed of Sound, curated by Elliott Sharp and Alanna Heiss at PS1, New York; and I Am Sitting In A Room: Sound Works by American Artists 1950-2000, curated by Stephen Vitiello as part of the American Century exhibition, Whitney Museum, New York. The Hayward...