Recent Works of Sound Art to Explore

Originally published in Sound of Life, 2022

Lawrence Abu Hamdan, The Witness-Machine Complex (2021), Kunstverein Nürnberg

Since the early 1900s when the futurist painter and composer Luigi Russolo published the manifesto L'arte dei Rumori [The Art of Noises], sound art saw unparalleled development with artists breaking rules and moving away from traditional, classical composition towards wild experimentation.

Sound art particularly took off in the late 1950s when John Cage and Max Neuhaus, along with the Fluxists and other figures and movements, propelled it into a rich medium that’s full of varied playfulness – shaping the lexicon of music theory and leaving a lasting legacy that has drastically influenced the work that followed.