record

Thesis Info

LABS ID
00648
Thesis Title
Le son plastique : empreindre le flux et l'inouï. Sonification et audification dans l'art de l'installation
Author
Lorella Abenavoli
2nd Author
3rd Author
Degree
PhD
Year
July 2017
Number of Pages
307
University
UQAM. Université du Québec À Montréal
Thesis Supervisor
Louise Poissant
Supervisor e-mail
poissant.louise AT uqam.ca
Other Supervisor(s)
Jocelyn Robert
Language(s) of Thesis
Department / Discipline
Faculté des Arts
Copyright Ownership
Lorella Abenavoli
Languages Familiar to Author
French, Italian, English
URL where full thesis can be found
www.archipel.uqam.ca/10757/
Keywords
Sonification. Audification. Parameter Mapping Sonification. Installation. Sound art. Audio art. Sound installation. So(g)nification.
Abstract: 200-500 words
For more than a century, first due to analog and later digital recording technologies, sound became material for the visual artist. With optical sound since the 1920's, and more definitively since the 1960's, many artists, first in music and later in sound art used sound to reveal physical phenomena as the point of departure of their artistic practices. Otherwise since the 1990's with the advent of new research disciplines related to computing and digital audio technologies, we can identify the development of a broad domain which uses sound to perceptualize non-audible physical phenomena or abstract data. This domain is called sonification. Sonification has become part of our every day user experience of digital interfaces as alerts or alarms, and also in some more elaborated uses, for example medicine (audio sonograms have become familiar practices) and in scientific research through increasingly complex auditory systems. The practice of sonification as a research field was defined in 1992, when Gregory Kramer organized the first symposium of the International Community for Auditory Display (ICAD). Ever since, the field has developped into a technologically and theoretically prolific and deeply interdisciplinary research. Many sound artists haven’t integrated concepts from this research field yet despite the fact that they have been producing a broad range of artworks in the same domain. This research-creation thesis focuses on sonification in installation practices and questions how sound has been becoming a medium for visual artists. As a sculptor, sonification became part of my own practice since the end of 1990. The dialog between my practice, those of other artists and the theoretical field of sonification is the foundation of this text. Absorbing the notion of sonification, redefining it from an artistic point of view was the main research question and the outcome is the contribution. The thesis aims to enlarge the territory of sound art, incorporating sonification as a specific area of the domain. Mediology constitutes the epistemological frame of this text giving it its orientation : how artists seize the modern and contemporary audiosphere in order to create soundscapes that reveal the unheard dimensions of matter. Two of my own artworks frame this research : Le Souffle de la terre (1997-2007) and VERTICALE, L. son d. la m..té. d. .a sève d..s un a.bre au pr..temps (2006-2015). My practice apart, the history of sonification, its definitions, its applications, its functionnal and taxonimic categories have been used for testing, comparing and analyzing several artworks from the sound art installation repertory. From this work, appear two essential orientations of sonification in the arts : first, artworks whose sounds have an analog and indexical relations with their sources. Those enter into audification taxonomy. Second, artworks whose sounds have code and symbolic relationship with their sources. Those enter into parameters mapping sonification taxonomy. My artistic and theoretical research are intimately linked within audification. Audification essentially consists, but not only, of catching inaudible movements and vibrations which most often belong to waves physics : electromagnetic and mechanical waves. It plays and reveals those imperceptible flows passing through and linking our bodies to cosmic phenomena. This practice shared by several artists is part of an artistic category, the Aeloectronics, a term recently coined by Douglas Kahn (2013). If this practice is pre-eminently contemporary, the indexical relation it maintains with its sources, make it closer to the practice of imprinting (empreinte), one of the most archaic artistic practices. This morphological approach of art reaffirms one of its implicit functions, considering artistic practice as knowledge in action for the practitioner and a materialization of knowledge for the public. Like Renaissance perspective, sonification draws up symbolic systems to describe the world. Sonification imposed itself in this thesis as a term, as a technic, as a theoretical and practical research discipline neutralizing the historically overload of figuration and representational terms. How, in audio art, has sound been producing auditive images which usher in a newer paradigm? This fundamental question comes up throughout the entire thesis.