THE POWER OF SOUND
‘The Power of Sound’, was the second event in our series of Malevich.io Symposiums. It explored the role of sound from communication, music, religious ceremonies, healing and therapeutic methods to sound as a weapon; tracing its evolution from tribal chanting to digital download. We opened a debate to explore the nature of sound and the impact it has on contemporary society. The Symposium begun by discussing communal experience in art and sound and continued by exploring sound in science, spiritual ceremony and psychology.
Norman Rosenthal on the Sensation Exhibition. "There’s a very famous piece by Handel called Zadok the Priest, a kind of coronation anthem, and when we did the Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy, I can’t remember which of the artists had a video, where the video was booming through the front hall of the Royal Academy, Zadok the Priest, a favourite piece of music of mine. Every morning I would go and feel so sorry for the guards eight or ten hours non-stop… even I was mad… now when I hear this music 30 years later if it happens to be on Radio 3, I rush to the radio and switch it off because I can’t bear it. How do you explain that? I always feel very sorry, Haroon, for the invigilators in the museums who are forced to listen to a thing day in, day out, they can’t escape, whereas the visitor will go in and hear it for ten minutes and that's just fine. Do you ever feel for the guards?"
Jerome Lewis on the action of music, the rhythm of language and the context of consumption: “when we speak, we are already processing the gestural component of the utterance we’re making prior to the words that we’re going to utter. With music it's the same … It's that action which is producing music, so when we think of music just as sound we’re missing the context, the ecological niche of music, which is much more an embodied process as opposed to simply an artefact we consume.”
Jerome Lewis on the polyphonic synthesis of tribal sound: “When these hunter-gatherers try to communicate with the forest, with this multi-organism, they sing polyphonically. That means that there's no single person who dominates the chorus, there are multiple melodic rhymes that each individual contributes to create a song that rises above the individual melodies. It’s that song, which is the forest speaking to itself effectively, and in those moment’s they create, that they establish a relationship with this sentient multi-organism that ensures they will always find the things they need for life.”
Haroon Mirza on 40hz sound and our national grid as a potential cure for Alzheimer’s: “They discovered that by administering light and sound at 40hz it helped to reduce amyloid plaque in mice, which is great if that works on humans for Alzheimer’s ... It then makes me think about our national grid, all the lights that illuminate our houses and streets are set at 50hz. I’m not sure what 50hz does, perhaps it's good or not. But it's having some kind of effect on us… we are receiving that day in and day out.”
Sir Norman Rosenthal on losing yours in Berghain and the pleasure and privilege of other worlds: “I don’t go to discotheques very often anymore, but when one does, you also lose yourself there. You lose yourself, but when you come out, you’re back into, what I consider to be, a kind of other world. Where is the real world?”
Leo Cosendai, Mendel Kaelen and Jerome Lewis on learning sound, educating your ears and sonic relationships. Leo: “I train people to do the Mongolian over-toning. When they start to learn they can’t hear the harmonics that I’m making and they’re making. But eventually with practice they start to hear the harmonics in their over-toning” Mendel: “even before we are born, our hearing is literally attuned to picking up differences in tone in such a way that babies learn the voice of their carrier. So, before you are born you already have some sonic relationship with your parents.” Jerome: “Appreciating these different music’s or different soundscapes is a process of educating your ears to listen to them … as we experience the context of that music, its ecological niche, as we talk about it in anthropology, then we start to appreciate it in deeper ways. So, it really is a process of educating ourselves.”
Dorothy Feaver and Lucia Pietroiusti on the ecological, physiological and psychological cost of inescapable artificial sound: Dorothy: “We live in a world where human-made noise is inescapable … Noise pollution is something that lots of studies have talked about being connected to dementia and other physiological problems.” Lucia “And biodiversity laws, because noise pollution in the oceans is affecting an enormous amount of creatures.”
Dorothy Feaver on the effects of organised sound and the difference between music and muzak: “Music might be something that moves you, whether it’s to dance or cry ... Muzak is something that numbs you. Just having spent some time in Japan, muzak was everywhere … there was some kind of muzak piped through to calm you down and impose this kind of mind control. Not to move or excite you, but to numb you.”
Mendel Kaelen on the communication of meaning and emotion in music, as well as its cerebral bond with language: “When you look at the brain structures that process language and music they are more or less the same. The Broca’s area and another part, called the primary auditory cortex, and there's a loop and information exchange that happens there according to music and language neuroscientists, that is primarily involved in giving meaning to structured sound and that is the commonality between language and music.”
Jack Jelfs on the cultural learning and subjective appeal of noise, sound and music: “Your appreciation of Beethoven is a much more learnt cultural thing, rather than something innate to what those notes are … You look at the Western scales and tuning systems and compare them to, for instance, music from the Middle East, which can sound quite strange and discordant to us, and I should think that music from another planet would sound literally completely alien to us.”
STEP SIREN
Haroon Mirza’s 2019 sculptural sound installation Step Siren utilises found material, electricity, light and sound to tangibly articulate the intangible. The piece acts to illustrate the inadvertent relationship between CFL light bulbs and transistor radios, which share no overlap in terms of time, yet when they are placed next to one another and an electrical current is applied, the radio’s speaker emits an audible buzz. In addition to this, the work also channels a number of other audio-centric mishaps to create a haphazard composition of noise which, despite lacking any form of consistency or structure, still manages to find a strange synthesis in the chaos of accidental sound. This auditory orchestration works in tandem with an intricate lighting system to offer a palpable expression of the unseen forces which govern our reality, yet which lie beyond our ready grasp. In essence, an audio-visual articulation of electrical pulses and currents. In this sense, it is a very literal work, an artistic iteration of scientific phenomenon akin to a landscape painting expressing a scene. Yet, just as a painter finds the beauty of a vista, so too Mirza finds the poetry of science. There’s an uncanny elegance to the piece in the way it uncannily allows the intangible to take form, with Step Siren, at its heart, seeking to viscerally explore the overlap of art and science, finding in this space the most essential, most compelling, qualities of each. The installation was debuted in London by Malevich at the Power of Sound Symposium at 180 the strand on 27th February 2020.
Leo Cosendai's work in making gong baths accessible worldwide has gained him recognition as a leading figure in the wellness movement. He has presented meditation through sound to over 1 million people with the help of his app Third Ear, as well as his TV appearances. Leo is also a HarperCollins author, teaches in London’s leading yoga studios and gives workshops, seminars and talks internationally. Articles about Leo's practice appeared in The Sunday Times, Forbes, The Guardian, Mr. Porter, VICE, Huffington Post, Daily Mail and Evening Standard to name but a few. Leo’s early years were spent between Switzerland and Asia, where he was exposed to a culture which has discreetly shaped his path. Passionate about art, music, and therapy, he went on to study composition, singing, yoga and meditation around the world, and in London.
Leo has been helping hundreds of thousands of people to transform their lives through Sound Meditation. A behaviour changing experience which helped eradicate the acute anxiety he had suffered from since early childhood. He now spends most of his time sharing those very tools and techniques.
Dorothy Feaver, based in London, is the creative mind behind Pervilion, initiating site-specific projects in unusual locations. She provides a platform for artists to make new work in response to the changing urban fabric. As she says, “with its kink in the spelling, Pervilion helps things grow in the cracks.” unusual locations. She provides a platform for artists to make new work in response to the changing urban fabric. As she says, “with its kink in the spelling, Pervilion helps things grow in the cracks.”
Performances, installations and participatory events have highlighted moments of community: in a karaoke pub on Walthamstow Market, as part of Art Night 2019; the defunct boiler rooms of a brewer’s headquarters in Canning Town; Welbeck Street Carpark, a midcentury landmark on the cusp of demolition; Oasis Farm Waterloo, an experimental but temporary natural haven; and in shop vitrines in Palermo’s artisanal district, alongside Manifesta Biennial. With a background in radio documentaries, her approach is rooted in audio, recording the research stages with interviews and field recordings, which shape the final experience. pervilion.com @pervilion Performances, installations and participatory events have highlighted moments of community: in a karaoke pub on Walthamstow Market, as part of Art Night 2019; the defunct boiler rooms of a brewer’s headquarters in Canning Town; Welbeck Street Carpark, a midcentury landmark on the cusp of demolition; Oasis Farm Waterloo, an experimental but temporary natural haven; and in shop vitrines in Palermo’s artisanal district, alongside Manifesta Biennial. With a background in radio documentaries, her approach is rooted in audio, recording the research stages with interviews and fi eld recordings, which shape the final experience.
pervilion.com
@pervilion
Jack Jelfs is an artist based in London, whose work combines sculptural, video and text elements with electronics and live performance. His interests include questions about the nature of consciousness, ontology, ritual, divinatory systems and the limits of language. He has released music under various aliases and performed or exhibited at venues including Tate Modern, the Barbican, Serpentine Gallery, FACT (Liverpool) and CCCB (Barcelona). In 2018 he and Jack Jelfs is an artist based in London, whose work combines sculptural, video and text elements with electronics and live performance. His interests include questions about the nature of consciousness, ontology, ritual, divinatory systems and the limits of language. He has released music under various aliases and performed or exhibited at venues including Tate Modern, the Barbican, Serpentine Gallery, FACT (Liverpool) and CCCB (Barcelona). In 2018 he and Haroon Mirza were joint recipients of CERN's Collide International Award. Haroon Mirza were joint recipients of CERN’s Collide International Award.
Mendel Kaelen is the founder and CEO of Wavepaths, a company that researches and develops methods that leverage the psychotherapeutic potential of music. Prior to Wavepaths, Mendel worked as a PhD student and post-doctoral neuroscientist at Imperial College London, where he pioneered a central of role of music in psychedelic therapies. He consults on the therapeutic use of music, publishes and speaks frequently on this topic, and has been featured in Nature News, San Francisco Chronicles, Vice Mendel is the founder and CEO of Wavepaths, a company that researches and develops methods that leverage the psychotherapeutic potential of music. Prior to Wavepaths, Mendel worked as a PhD student and post-doctoral neuroscientist at Imperial College London, where he pioneered a central of role of music in psychedelic therapies. He consults on the therapeutic use of music, publishes and speaks frequently on this topic, and has been featured in Nature News, San Francisco Chronicles, Vice Motherboard, Rolling Stone, TEDx, Wired, GQ, Even Standard a.o. Mendel lives and works in London (UK). Motherboard, Rolling Stone, TEDx, Wired, GQ, Even Standard a.o. Mendel lives and works in London (UK).
Jerome Lewis is the Associate Professor of Anthropology at University College London. His research into the hunter-gatherers of Central Africa began in 1993. During many years of fieldwork in the Republic of Congo (Brazzaville) with BaYaka forest hunter-gatherers he studied egalitarian politics, taboo and myth, and the role of ritual, music and dance in society. His publications examine music and dance in cross-cultural perspective, and the evolution of language, music and modern human culture. Current research examines myth as experienced through ritual, music and dance.
Hunter-gatherers' relations with outsiders such as farmers and officials, or with logging and conservation initiatives on their lands have detrimentally affected their rights and livelihoods. As many groups lose access to their best forest and are forbidden to hunt, Jerome does applied research supporting conservation efforts by forest people and facilitating them to better represent themselves to outsiders using new technologies developed by the Extreme Citizen Science team he co-directs at UCL. He is also the director of the Centre for the Anthropology of Sustainability, and the Flourishing Diversity programme facilitating representatives of indigenous wisdom traditions to contribute directly to debates seeking solutions to the current ecological and ethical crisis facing the modern world.
Svetlana Marich is a curator, writer and contemporary art expert. She graduated from Moscow State University in 2008 with MA in Journalism. While doing her PhD she taught an Alternative Media course at Moscow State University, exploring new forms of media and subcultures influence on them. At this time, she was also the editor of the contemporary poetry section of "Delusionsist Magazine."
In 2008 she co-organized the exhibition "China, Forward!" and was appointed as Head of Phillips auction house in Russia. Marich worked on the third Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, curated by Jean-Hubert Martin (2009) and the fourth Biennale with Peter Weibel (2011). Since 2014 she has been living in London and holds the position of Worldwide Deputy Chairman at Phillips auction house. Marich also works as a curator and exhibition producer. Her latest projects include Zaha Hadid’s retrospective in 2015 and Anselm Kiefer’s solo show in 2017, both at the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg. As well as this, she curated Evgeniy Antufiev’s exhibition "When art became part of landscape", Part II at the Konenkov Studiomuseum and Part III at the Multimedia Art Museum Moscow (Innovation prize nomination), which received Kandinsky Prize Award for Project of the Year, 2019.
In 2018 she launched ‘Future Talks,’ a series of conversations exploring ideas on future changes to subjects such as family, community, surveillance, technology, work and leisure. Since 2018 Marich has been working on the Malevich platform, building a new ecosystem for artists, museums, collectors and audiences.
Haroon Mirza was born in London in 1977 where he lives and works. He has a BA in Painting from Winchester School of Art, an MA in Design Critical Practice and Theory from Goldsmiths College (2006) and an MA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art and Design (2007).
Haroon has won international acclaim for installations that test the interplay and friction between sound and light waves and electric current. He devises sculptures, performances and immersive installations that pry on one’s awareness of their own experience. An advocate of interference (in the sense of electro-acoustic or radio disruption), he creates situations that purposefully cross wires. He describes his role as a composer, manipulating his primary medium, electricity, a live, invisible and volatile natural phenomenon combined with a varied plethora of material such as household objects, turntables and musical instruments, LEDs, furniture, video footage and existing artworks by other artists to behave differently. Processes are left exposed and sounds occupy space in an unruly way, testing codes of conduct and charging the atmosphere. Mirza asks us to reconsider the perceptual distinctions between noise, sound and music, and draws into question the categorisation of cultural forms. "All music is organised sound or organised noise," he says citing Edgar Varèse. "So as long as you’re organising acoustic material, it’s just the perception and the context that defines it as music or noise or sound or just a nuisance" (2013)
During the 'Power of Sound' symposium, Haroon performed his sound and visual piece 'The Construction of an Act.'
Lucia Pietroiusti is is Curator of General Ecology at the Serpentine Galleries (London) as well as the Curator of Sun & Sea (Marina) by Rugile Barzdziukaite, Vaiva Grainyte and Lina Lapelyte, the Lithuanian Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale, 2019. She is the curator (with Filipa Ramos) of the durational festival on interspecies consciousness, "The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish" (2018-ongoing); and the co-curator (with Kay Watson) and co-presenter (with Victoria Sin) of The Serpentine Podcast. Pietroiusti is currently researching more-than-humanism, ecology, interspecies consciousness, species extinction, plant intelligence, botany, eco-matriarchy and myth.
Sir Norman Rosenthal is an independent curator and art historian. After a short time spent as exhibitions officer at Brighton Museum and Art Gallery, and subsequently curator at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, he joined the Royal Academy of Arts, London as Exhibitions Secretary in 1977, where he remained until 2008. Since leaving the Royal Academy he has continued to curate exhibitions and to write on established and emerging contemporary artists. German art of the 20th and 21st centuries has always been of particular interest to him.
