Art that speaks to you. Literally.

By Roberta Smith

These days the whole art world seems to be alive with the sound of one thing or another. Museums, of course, are not as quiet as they used to be. But contemporary art itself is also a lot noisier, usually on purpose.

Almost regardless of medium, today's art comes with soundtracks, voiceovers, loudly moving parts or interactive elements. The computer and the Internet have brought out the inner polymath in many artists, who often play in bands and now sample and splice sound and music as easily as they once cut and pasted magazine images. Exhibition catalogues incorporate CDs. Speakers and headsets abound in museums, galleries and art fairs. Walk through a laser beam and a darkened gallery bursts into song, or apparent gunfire erupts or a thudding kung fu battle ensues. In the current show of works by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller at the Luhring Augustine Gallery in Chelsea, stepping on a wah-wah pedal unleashes dangerously loud blasts of Jimi Hendrix's unforgettable rendition of The Star Spangled Banner.

What is sound art? Artists have been making it for years, and, under a variety of terms, critics have been writing about it. Its complex history dates back to early modernism: like an aural Duchamp, the Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo declared in his 1913 manifesto, "The Art of Noises," that all worldly sounds were music and urged the building of new musical instruments. John Cage, patron saint of postwar sound art, advanced both arguments in the late 1940's, bolstered by electronic media, which supplemented the world of "found" sound with unworldly, artificial sound.

After Cage, Fluxus furthered the cause by integrating music, art, performance and poetry while playing down objects. Minimalism emphasized a crucial aspect: real space, adding to the tradition of sound-art-as-performance and sculpture-as-instrument the all-important concept of 'sound environments' or 'soundscapes'. Post-Minimalism brought video into artists' studios, and the soundtrack, as well as the intriguing gap between sound and image, emerged as a field of operations. Artists with no music background began to see sound as sonic material that could be manipulated to shape perceptions of time and space.

Defined purely, sound art is relatively immaterial, more heard than seen, and perceived physiologically while moving through space, rather than while sitting down and listening, as with most music. Recent instances of purity include Ms. Cardiff's eerie headset pieces from the mid-1990's in which the viewer moves about to spoken instructions and an unfolding plot, complete with aural effects that create unsettling illusions of being somewhere else altogether. An even better example is Ms. Cardiff's glorious 40 Part Motet, shown at P.S. 1 as well as in Canada and Germany - a circle of elevated speakers from which poured the sound of a chorus singing a 16th-century motet by Thomas Tallis, one singer per speaker.

The recent 2004 Whitney Biennial in New York (http://www.whitney.org/biennial/) has incorporated art that uses sound since the late 70's, when film and video began to be included. In the 1995 Biennial, Rirkrit Tiravanija deployed sound as social disruption by allowing his allotted space, a film installation, to double as a practice studio for rock bands and other musicians. In 1997, Martin Kersels wired the museum director's office for sounds that, translated into electronic noises, were broadcast in the museum's lobby.

Sound art reached a critical mass of sorts with the 2002 Biennial, the first to come with its own CD and listening gallery. Organised by Debra Singer, the sound section was one of the most consistently good patches in the show. But most of the pieces, confined to the listening gallery or encountered on headsets in the show, qualified as music, spoken-word performance or radio plays. (Although one of the listening-gallery works, Stephen Vitiello's World Trade Centre Recordings: Winds After Hurricane Floyd, originated as a pure-sound installation that was presented at the World Trade Centre in 1999 and at Diapason in October 2001.)

The 2004 Biennial had an outstanding CD though no listening gallery. Instead, sound pieces or works in which sound is a major component were prominent throughout the exhibition and on the show's unusually crowded events calendar. Ranging from audio pieces to sound-oriented video installations to live performance, these works gave sound a presence in the Biennial that is commensurate with its role in contemporary art, and nearly as difficult to encapsulate.

Visitors emerged from this year's Biennial with a seriously transformed sense of how sounds and images can be dovetailed or rent asunder; of sound in space, both social and aural; of the role of performance, live, recorded or implied and of the capacity of the digital and the virtual for surgical dissections and magnifications of sound.

The show included the percussive splicings of human form and emotion that are a specialty of the haunting, strangely hilarious videotapes of Aïda Ruilova, one of the art world's many artist-musicians, and the irresistible syncopations of video, music (a new song by the duo Los Super Elegantes), wallpaper and light by the collaborative Assume Vivid Astro Focus. Pip Chodorov manipulated a film of the musician-composer-artist Charlemagne Palestine in performance until there was one frame per musical note. Eve Sussman's film, Eighty-nine Seconds at Alcazar, presented a slow-motion recreation of Velázquez's Meninas to the sound of music by Jonathan Bepler, of Cremaster fame. Chloe Piene's Blackmouth manipulated the image and sound of a child's tantrum into an episode of horrific implications.

In the elevators, visitors heard recordings of choirs, both real and imagined, sent in response to a project posted on Learningtoloveyoumore.com, the website of the populist artist Harrell Fletcher, and edited by Mr. Fletcher and Miranda July. In the downstairs bathrooms, Jim O'Rourke - legendary musician, sound artist and all-around wizard - insinuated an audio work of subtly manipulated ambient sound. He also performed, mixing live and pre-recorded sound as an accompaniment for one of his films.

Elsewhere, we listened in on the daily conversations of the inhabitants of a Canary Islands fishing village in Craigie Horsfield's slow-moving El Hierro Conversation (2002). Seen and heard at Documenta 11, it's an unusual experience in spatial immersion in nonabstract sounds that change locations in perfect sync with the images of the villagers, which shift among four video screens. We also found ourselves amid a choir of black-clad schoolchildren in Count on Us, Marina Abramovic's multiscreen meditation on the United Nations' role in the Balkan wars of the 1990's.

More cheerfully, Julianne Swartz layered together different recordings, both spoken and sung, of Somewhere Over the Rainbow and piped the sound, and its wiring, through clear plastic tubes in the Whitney's stairwell, where it mixed with the plentiful ambient sound. In the museum's courtyard, one encountered El Tubo Complete, a walk-in corrugated steel tube by the Chicago design collective Simparch, which invited fellow Chicagoans Kevin Drumm and Deborah Stratman to create sound and video, respectively, for its interior.

Other highlights on the Biennial events calendar were the hip-hoppish video-game soundtrack sampling of Cory Arcangel and his group Beige, the low-fi art punk band Tracy and the Plastics (a trio that is actually one person, Wynne Greenwood, and two video projections), the New York debut of video-installation artist Catherine Sullivan (directing a cast of 30) and, above all, the incomparable performance-artist-turned cabaret singer Antony of Antony and the Johnsons, who is doing for Tiny Tim's falsetto what Maria Callas did for bel canto.

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