À bruit secret Hearing in Art

Comprising many different kinds of sound, the acoustic world surrounds humans like a universal «composition». What we hear evokes emotions, memories, and associations that are shaped by subjective and sociocultural factors and that vary over time. From the late 1960s, researchers like Canadian composer and sound theorist R. Murray Schafer divided our acoustic environment into soundscapes, distinguishing between three kinds: natural, technical, and human, with the latter including both the voice and music. Since the early twentieth century, if not before, the sounds of machines and technology have become ever more dominant, encroaching on the original sounds of nature all over the planet. Schafer called on us to refine our sense of hearing, laying important foundations for ecoacoustics, the study of how environmental factors and human activities impact on the acoustic aspects of ecosystems.

For the first time ever in Switzerland, Museum Tinguely presents Robert Rauschenberg’s Oracle (1962-1965), a five-part assemblage of found objects that exudes cacophonic radio sounds and that even features flowing water.

In Ursula Biemann’s video Acoustic Ocean (2018), the Sami protagonist appears as a field researcher equipped with hydrophones and parabolic microphones to record the acoustic ecology of the waters around Norway’s Lofoten archipelago. On many levels, Acoustic Ocean addresses themes around water, its mysterious sounds, and the lifeforms that depend on it.

In his audio and light installation of the series phantom streams, the young Danish sound artist Alexander Tillegreen deals with the psychoacoustic phenomenon of so-called 'phantom words'. He works with auditory illusions and investigates how the acoustic comprehension and understanding of the content of edited sound recordings of single and multi-syllabic words in different languages functions in space. For Something Going On Above My Head (1999/2023), Columbian artist Oswaldo Maciá collected audio recordings of 2000 different birds from four continents and used them to compose a 30-minute piece that fills the space, played back via megaphone loudspeakers.

In the work Musik für die Augen (1982), of which an exhibition copy is shown in the Museum Tinguely, Rolf Julius shows that as well as hearing with our ears, we can also sense the vibrations of invisible soundwaves with our eyeballs. Abstract compositions of shapes and colors have the power to evoke acoustic and even synaesthetic visual worlds, purely via the imagination, as demonstrated by Jorinde Voigt’s new series of reliefs Rhythm, made of coloured paper.