“In 1998 Scanner completed a piece entitled Surface Noise… built around movement through London. Here is his explanation of the methods by which the piece was devised:
“[T]his work took a red double-decker bus as its focus. Making a route
determined by overlaying the sheet music from London Bridge is Falling
Down onto a map of London, I recorded the sounds and images at points
where the notes fell on the cityscape. These co-ordinates provided the score for the piece and by using software that translated images into sound and original source recordings, I was able to mix the work live on each journey through a speaker system we installed throughout the bus, as it followed the original walk shuttling between Big Ben and St Paul's Cathedral.”
Back to me. This is a good example of the kind of arbitrary methods by which some sound artists go about creating a piece of sound art'. This work has very little to do with the sounds, and is all about the process. It could be argued that London is so huge and full of sound this was simply a nicely topical yet random way to select where to access these sounds. However, if you cared about the sound of the outcome, wouldn’t you care what kind of route you took? If the main focus was on what the audience would be hearing, surely you’d research the places and areas for the best symphonies? It seems a bit of a cop out to me. Having said that, i never heard the work, but how can this be 'sound art' or even sound manipulation, when it has so little to do with the vagaries of sound? Sound may be the medium, but it’s not what’s being used or explored to produce the effect. Here it’s just being used as proof of a process, comparable in relevance and meaning to the photograph exhibited of a performance piece. I like it when sound artists like sound.
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