Object of Shame
In its earliest version – the version I pitched to the Soundwaves Festival and the Brighton Museum and Art Gallery – “Noli Me Tangere” was to focus on specific objects in particular locations amongst the glass cabinets, display cases and plinths. I wanted to choose identified artefacts and work outwards from these. Initial candidates included the shiny surfaces of a Michael Graves designed Alessi whistling kettle; an enamel creamware mug (with the wabi-sabi of a brown crack visible on its lip); an oat and orange Emanuel Ungaro dress and jacket cut from the same Space Age 1960s cloth that Pierre Cardin, André Courrèges and Paco Rabanne enjoyed; and a glass vase that looked like a distended cat’s eye marble.
Finding the right objects would be fun and, once found, they could provide an appropriate frame for the kinds of soundworlds I wanted to evoke. With a defined piece in mind, things would become more manageable. The kinds of sound I was thinking of presenting to the listeners’ ears included: sounds of the craft or industrial processes involved in the production of the object; sounds of the object in use and the places where the object might have been used; the kinds of sounds that could be heard were the object to be struck, scraped, brushed and stroked. I would record material for all these sources and use that material as the raw ingredients from which to cook up a ‘musical’ composition that could be heard while wandering the galleries.
This object-orientated approach would, in part, be a sly reference to the notion of the ‘sound object’, an idea that is talked about a lot within discussions in sound art and music. The ‘objet sonore’ was proposed by Pierre Schaeffer, a composer who used the Studio d’Essai in France’s national radio station as a laboratory of experimental practice. Working initially with phonograph recordings and then magnetic tape, Schaeffer used real-world recordings as the basis for a compositional strategy that had the potential (at least) for taking its listeners far outside the parameters established by the conventional orchestra.
I don’t think I ever really got what Schaeffer was up to. I remember talking to students about “Etudes aux Chemins de Fer” (= “Study on Trains”) as if what Schaeffer was after was the rich allusional resonance of the sound of railways in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Shamefully, I’ve not actually read Schaeffer’s original book where he elaborates on the idea of the ‘object sonore’ but as I understand things now, these allusions were precisely what Schaeffer was trying to escape. For him, the sound object is “any sound phenomenon or event perceived as a coherent whole (...) regardless its source or meaning”.
Whatever the exact nuances of Schaeffer’s position – and writing these words has guilted me into going to the library to read up what he actually said – focusing on specific objects in the museum would allow me a sidereal (and slightly satirical) reference to this concept of the ‘sound object’.
There would also be, in adopting this method, an opportunity to find myself in the dim shadow of another of those giants of sound art who block out the sun: John Cage. Cage, after an encounter with the film-maker who was the lyricist of the non-objective image and a contributor to Disney’s “Fantasia” learned the following: “Oskar Fischinger made a remark to me which dropped me into the world of noise. He said: ‘Everything in the world has a spirit, and this spirit becomes audible by its being set into vibration’. He started me on a path of exploration of the world around me which has never stopped. Of hitting and scratching and scraping and rubbing everything, with anything I can get my hands on”.
But things, as they always do with me, gang awry. Because I didn’t want to use a voice-over and because I wanted those who experienced “Noli Me Tangere” to wander around, it was very difficult to resolve how I could direct people’s attention to particular locations in the Museum. Sure, I could use a photo of the object and stick that on a map but that seemed to concede too much to the visual.
So I have moved from individual objects to collections of objects, from the condensed qualities of the particular to the broader, diffuse characteristics that can be attributed to the group. The listener will now hear the atmospheres that they trigger by selecting the track that a map associates with a particular ‘hot spot’. This solution loses a lot of what had initially inspired me. But it will be simpler to deliver technically; it will allow people to choose their own route through the museum (rather than having to follow a proscribed itinerary); will allow them to move about a particular room or corridor rather than standing stock still and peering; it will also allow them to decide how long they want to listen to each track.


