What you hear is what you get…

This is the third installment in our series to explore Art and the Five Senses where we are for once hearing and not looking. The maybe hardest sense to “make visible”.

As you know by now: The Heidi Horten Collection in Vienna is showing LIGHT SOUND SENSES from 20 September 2024 – 23 March 2025. Inspired by this, we asked our beloved Gallery Girl London aka Lizzy Vartanian as an art historian and the wonderful Melisza Neckel a Capetonian in Vienna and a Psychotherapist, with a private practice, how the senses relate to art and our enjoyment and experience of it.

We will cover all 5 senses in the coming months and urge you to go see the show if you can, tune into the works described, see what your own senses tell you about the show, the work and yourself.

Sense Three: Hearing

Art is usually something that is to be seen and not heard. When we relate sound and the arts, you might think of an orchestra or an opera, not something to be displayed in a museum or gallery. Increasingly, however, noise has begun to be implemented into the visual art sphere throughout the last century and is becoming more and more commonplace in collections and at private views.

A relatively new concept in art history, the term “sound art” was first used on a book cover in 1974 and in an exhibition title at MoMA in 1979, but one of the earliest examples of sound art is usually accredited to Luigi Russolo’s Intonarumori, which were created between 1910 and 1930. “Intonarumori” means “noisemakers” in Italian. They were instruments he built to perform music alongside a manifesto he wrote in 1913 called “The Art of Noises”, where he stated that the evolution of the urban industrial soundscape required us to make new approaches to music. Different from conventional instruments, they were inspired by factory noises and the sounds of guns used in World War I. Most importantly, they were intended to be heard in an art space, and not in a theatre.

Just over a century later, Carsten Nicolai has created an interactive sound installation especially for the Heidi Horten show. interAvision explores the connection between light and sound, mixing the sense we usually associate with art – sight – with sound, creating a unique synesthetic experience. At irregular intervals, short sounds are paired with ambient light to alter the light-sound ambience of the room and create a sensitization of our audiovisual senses. While the visual element is still there, noise is added to enhance it.

In between Russolo’s instruments and Nicolai’s installation, more artists have been turning to noise to create their work. Sound art has even been recognised by prestigious art world prizes. In 2016, audio artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan jointly won the Turner Prize for his work based on interviews with former detainees at Syria’s Saydnaya prison. His work focuses on the political effects of listening, exploring audio’s effect on human rights and law. Often, sound is used as a medium within artworks that comment on the state of our society.

Like speech and noise in everyday life, sound art is often site specific, played in installations where the atmosphere is carefully monitored. All of our other senses are also controlled so that we are particularly receptive to that sound. These installations themselves often make use of digital technology, which explains why sound art is a relatively new phenomenon. Haroon Mirza’s 2015 exhibition “Emerging Paradigm” was especially designed for the refrigerator chamber of Madrid’s old slaughterhouse, Matadero. The work was intended to reflect the cultural shift from the contemporary to the emerging paradigm. Like sound itself, installations are often designed with a space in mind, being unable to be repeated identically anywhere else and being sensitive to its surroundings. 

Sieh dir diesen Beitrag auf Instagram an

Ein Beitrag geteilt von Heidi Horten Collection (@heidihorten.collection)

Also present within the world of sound art is “sound sculpture”, where an object produces noise. An example of this is Clido Meireles’ Babel from 2001. Babel is physically made up of a tower of hundreds of radios, each tuned into a different station. Meireles has likened his work to a “tower of incomprehension”, relating to the story of the Tower of Babel, where God was offended by the creation of a tower tall enough to reach the heavens, causing the builders to speak in different languages and no longer able to communicate with each other. The noise emitted from the radios all merge into one incoherent drone. 

Also interesting within sound art is the notion that sometimes there is no sound at all. In 1952 John Cage performed 4’33” which consisted of four minutes and 33 seconds of silence. Performers were invited to not play their instruments, prompting the audience to become hyperaware of the sounds of their surroundings. Meanwhile, deaf artist Christine Sun Kim explores her own experience within her work, collaborating with deaf performers and creating the video installation Close Readings to highlight the limitations of captions on deaf viewers.  

Of course, we cannot talk about sound art without also touching on performance. While sound art and performance art are usually considered two separate disciplines, we cannot deny the audio element of performance. An example of this would be Gilbert & George’s 1969 The Singing Sculpture performance, where they covered their hands and heads with metal powders and sang to songs for days at a time. Sound-specific works often have a performance element to them too. Similarly Tarek Atoui’s Reverse Sessions series at the Tate Modern invited musicians to interact with unconventional instruments he had created, blurring the lines between installation and performance. 

Some say that hearing is another form of seeing. Sound may help add to what it is exactly we are seeing, altering the way we perceive the visual element of an artwork. While sound art itself is a modern concept, we have long used speech to discuss the art we are viewing for centuries and even millennia. So maybe sound art will even be the art of the future. 

How does hearing even work? What happens so we can hear?

The sense of hearing is truly fascinating. The complex interaction of many parts working together. The ears, brain and subjective lived experience of each person. It all starts with the outer ear, directing sound waves to the eardrum which causes it to vibrate. These vibrations then move through the middle ear and into the inner ear. The nerve endings then transform the vibrations into electrical impulses, which travel along the auditory nerve into the brain. 

Your brain receives information through these electrical impulses. These signals are then interpreted by the brain and then the brain translates this into what we hear. When your brain receives a signal from your ear, it needs to direct it to the correct part of the brain that can eventually identify that specific sound. This is the interaction of your neurons, also called brain cells. The part where two or more neurons connect is called a synapse and are responsible for the communication between all your brain cells. Our brains are amazing and learn to differentiate between different frequencies and or vibrations because of a process called synaptic plasticity. This allows connections between neurons to change with your lived experience.

Our unique lived experience of the world affects our sense of hearing. This is why some sounds or noises affect each of us differently. Our brains recognition and association with certain voices, especially the bond between mother and child starting in the womb. One of the first brain developments of an unborn baby is voice recognition. 

Another point of interest around the sense of hearing is the growing popularity of ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response). This is a physical and psychological experience in response to a specific stimulus, which can create pleasurable and relaxing sensations. We are seeing these videos all over social media right now. There is of course also personal preference when it comes to what we find pleasurable or relaxing. It is important to also mention that some nervous systems are affected differently in regards to sounds. All together this is about neurodiversity, which simply put, refers to the different ways a person’s brain processes information.

Bernhard Leitner, Serpentinata, 2006

Bernhard Leitner combines sound and space to create and acoustically immersive environment. In the sound-space sculpture, he uses 48 sound sources and organic looking plastic tubes hanging freely in the room, with hidden wiring inside. The composition of natural and artificial sounds defines tight and expansive spaces, making the sculpture seem like a living acoustic organism. As visitors move through the sculpture, the sounds dynamically interact with their bodies, intensifying their perception of space and movement. 

This sculpture in some form could represent therapy in itself. The act of hearing and listening. This sculpture resonates deeply with the therapy room, and the therapist and client. Therapy requires the client and therapist to give attention to the tone, pace, and volume. The sound of the client gives profound insight into the authenticity and felt experience of the story being shared. Just like with Leitner’s sculpture, there are natural and artificial sounds, which provide information to the therapist. The sense of hearing guides a therapist’s frame of questioning, and overall approach. If a client speaks with a different tone, a therapist might become curious of what is happening within the client and therefore explore that with the client. The sense of hearing plays a major role in the effectiveness of the therapy, as the core values of a therapy space are to create a space where the clients feel heard. The skill of listening is a vital tool for a therapist. We need to hear what is being said and hear what is beneath what is being said. We need to interpret what is being said and even create space for many possibilities and or interpretations. The sense of hearing and therefore listening is the reason being a therapist can be exhausting. It takes a lot of cognitive processing and multitasking. Your brain gets tired quickly when working with such focus for a full 50 minute session. This is also tiring for the client. It takes both client and therapist. Just like with art it requires a viewer and artist. 

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Introduction by Anna Maja Spiess. First Paragraph by Lizzy Vartanian. Second Paragraph by Melisza Neckel.

The exhibition featuring the works is LIGHT SOUND SENSES at the Heidi Horten Collection, Vienna. 20 September 2024 – 23 March 2025

Christine Schörkhuber website & Carsten Nicolai instagram & Bernhard Leitners website

EVENT ALERT: planning your Vienna trip?

And on Jan 28th 2025 at both 5pm & 6pm there is a special guided tour: Spotlight on: László Moholy-Nagy the great revolutionary light artist.

Header image:
^{Carsten Nicolai, bausatz noto ∞, 1998/2015/2024 © Ouriel Morgensztern/Heidi Horten Collection}