Sound installation refers to a newly formed art form that uses sound as a primary medium and is typically designed for a specific space or environment. Unlike traditional music performances, sound installations are often immersive and interactive, encouraging audiences to experience sound more spatially and dynamically. They can incorporate various elements, including recorded sounds, live performances, electronic manipulation, and physical objects that produce sound. According to the reading provided in this module, this term evolved from ‘spatial music’ which is ‘concerned with articulating sonic geometries within three-dimensional space’. The sound installation applies more social and political concern from a critical perspective, questioning the influence and the construction of space. Such art forms tend to use ‘sonic-spacial imagination’ within spatial expressions.
For example, the Notting Hill Carnivals in London, which serves as one of the largest street festivals in Europe (Stratton & Zuberi, 2016), is constructed to celebrate the Black Caribbean heritage with a main feature on cultural music. By doing so, a series of music performance forms have been applied during the carnivals like the parade with ‘steel band’ and ‘mas band’ (Stratton & Zuberi, 2016), and also the ‘sound system’, which could be identified as a sound installation. The ‘sound system’ refers to a ‘super-amplified mobile system’ (Notting Hill Carnival, 2024), which consists of a distinct arrangement of three speaker stacks or towers that are placed on the street corners or crossroads and surrounded audiences by the sound and make them fully immersed in it, by projecting speakers inward to form a triangular soundscape around the listeners. This activity has the tradition from the Black migration from Trinidad and Tobago to the UK (Hall, 2015), that the poor Caribbean artists play their handmade instruments and original songs with distinctive bass alongside the street in Notting Hill (Stratton & Zuberi, 2016). In this case, the ‘sound system’ could be seen as the restructuring of the spacial expression of Notting Hill street with the emphasis on ethnic politics and Caribbean culture.
Reference:
Hall, S. (2015) ‘Calypso kings’, in Bull, M. and Back, L. (eds) The auditory culture reader. 2nd edn. London: Routledge.
Notting Hill Carnival (2024) Carnival info. Available at: https://nhcarnival.org/ (Accessed: 20 January 2025).
Stratton, J., and Zuberi, N. (eds) (2016) Black popular music in Britain since 1945. London and New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group (Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series). Available at: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315569482.
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