"Music is like the wind. You don't know where it came from and you don't know where it went.” - Eric Dolphy

Sound has no center. Unlike vision, sound wraps around you, comes and goes, is fleeting. In SOUND MACHINES, seven artists explore the strange world of sound through new technologies. Their works cross optical and aural domains, creating new interfaces between the realms of sound and technology and art.

Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst — who launched the generative musical instrument Holly+ in 2021 — have created an audiovisual work, Play From Memory (2024). The piece compares the way humans learn music to the way humans train machines to learn music, and creates new ways to listen, in turn. Yoko Ono realizes her SOUND PIECE V (1996/2024) — a kind of musical score converted into a simple set of prompts as a digital, on-chain work that builds a living archive of laughter. Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley's CANCEL YOURSELF (2024) is a multisensory, interactive video game set to an ambient score that upends the traditional roles of player and played. Another interactive interface is presented in American Artist and Tommy Martinez's Integrity Protocol/Lower Limb Lecture (2023/24), which invites participants to devise their own soundscape based on the drones and disembodied, synthesized voice of the artist. And 0xDEAFBEEF's PAYPHONE (2024) will involve a live call-and-response performance, revealing histories of telephony, tokenization, and exchange.

These works connect to the history of modern art and sound, in which artists and composers and performers heard sound as a new arena for perception, experience, and interaction. In the 1950s and '60s, electronic and digital technologies radically expanded the definition of sound and music to encompass vibrations — from radio waves to cosmic rays — and noise. Radios, turntables, synthesizers, amplifiers, and computers all changed the way we interacted with art. Suddenly, we were no longer passive listeners or viewers of a symphony or a painting. Instead, we realized that we were surrounded all the time by waves, signals, and beats — even if we didn't notice them, or recognize them, or if we had to tune in to hear them. In 1963, Ono's EARTH PIECE instructed: “Listen to the sound of the earth turning.” Or, as John Cage said, “There is no such thing as silence.”

At The Museum of Modern Art, these crossings between art and sound and technology were everywhere, even if they are little known today. Cage performed his first full concert at MoMA in 1943 (reviewers compared it to “the meaningless sounds made by children”); the Moog synthesizer debuted at MoMA in 1969; and Sonny Rollins played live in MoMA's Sculpture Garden in 1965, recording the landmark album There Will Never Be Another You. From Yoko Ono to Terry Adkins, Laurie Anderson to Kraftwerk, artists and musicians fused their endeavors throughout the twentieth and twentieth-first centuries. Today, the artists in SOUND MACHINES bring to the fore MoMA's deep history with sound and the sonic. They redefine sound once more with technologies ranging from generative AI to blockchains. They come in like music, and go where we haven't gone before.

Vox Anima #50