“Listening to music is listening to all noise” — Jacques Attali

These past two weeks I’ve been working on a video/web project called Construction, which you can view here.

This project explores the notion that unintentional sounds are created through different types of audio production and listening. Such sounds can include guitar pedals in live performance, speaker and headphone hiss while listening to music and hard-drive movement, typing and clicking when using a laptop in live performance or audio production.

The John Cage/postwar philosophy that “all music is just sound, and hence all sound is music” playsto the idea that these sounds are just as important as the music coming out of them. This work work examines the social and personal hierarchies that exist in what we listen for when we’re in a state of listening to music.

I have chosen to amplify these sounds and use them as sole sources for my own work. Making these sounds the most important is an inversion of the way in which we commonly perceive, experience and listen to music.

I am well aware that there appears to be an irony in this work in the sense that the sounds that I have used become music (depending on how you look at things) and that in listening to this work you override the noises that are created by the technology used to listen with. I consider your listening experience to add another dimension to the work and (hopefully) put you into a state where you question these sorts of things (in which case, this project succeeds).

The title of this work references the way Pierre Schaeffer approached making music, which is to say he saw it as “organised sound”. I see music in a similar way. Furthermore, my work (and Construction in particular) reflects my interest in minimalist aesthetics on visual and aural levels. On a formal level, this work is influenced by the video/web project In B Flat, and a series of video works by Christian Marclay.

The videos are intended to be played back simultaneously, which is why they play automatically and loop. If you wish to view them separately, however, you can visit my Vimeo account.