Coming into the course my idea of sound arts was anything experimental. I hadn’t distinguished the difference between music and art. After reading Alan Licht’s article ‘Origins, Development and Ambiguities’ it became clear to me that just because music doesn’t conform to the status quo for that genre the music is placed in, doesn’t make it sound art. It registered to me that music is limited by the constraints of the mediums used to listen to it. For instance, CDs and vinyls have a limited timespan of sound they can hold and speakers can’t recreate the exact positions of sounds accurately even with surround sound listening mediums.

To me Sound art is organic, something that can evolve over time by being influenced and affected by its surroundings. Something you have to experience in the atmosphere the artist has decided upon. Listening to a recording of a sound art piece is like listening back to something through second hand ears. The little idiosyncrasies of listening to the piece live and in person in the ambience created for it by the artist is impossible to replicable through speakers. Sound art, to me, is as much about sound as it is the other senses. The surroundings in which you listen to a piece and how this influences your other senses has a major effect in how I believe you listen to a piece and therefore how you perceive and react to it.