Ilari Valbonesi - The Paradigm of Listening (Sound, Voice, Body, Audience, Radio Art

Sound is attractive. It catches the ear, enchants, disturbs, and scares. But it is also imperative. Sound is both a means and an end. The decisive interest devoted to the "strange" reflexivity of soundbecame a paradoxical instance of art, music and philosophy in the twentieth century. Further, it has encouraged the emergence of a genuine "paradigm of listening" from which I take steps to tracethe event of a conceptual category of plastic art so called Sound Art : Art of Sound, that reflecting on itself, defines its own historical context. Sound hits us where our disposition is already a move towards the "given" sound, for that hearing which accords and affords us whatever there really is to hear. Which means there is an "eventual" sound, which happens in-between me and the things in-between me and others: Sound originates "elsewhere" even though we are implicated. The sound of the voice is also erotic. It's like an intercourse in between own and alien. It's magnetic and it orients us in space, it defines boundaries and mixes the real and the imagined. We can experience the public nature of the audience, the spatiality of sound in its symbolic occurrences in buildings that accommodate the aesthetic experience of sound: the theatre, concert hall, the square from the gallery, and theauditorium of the woods. But this is not the proper meaning of sound in space, nor qualifies its access to a space. Sound is more of a timeless space. The body itself is an instrument that records itsenvironment while reconfiguring existing environments. In 2004 I coined the phrase ‘Acusmatic ethics’ to describe the interspecific character of sound and its synthetic temporality. If we understand that listening to something is to record it, recording itself is also a kind of ‘answering’behavior. Obviously, radio, tapes, samplers are able to isolate, alter and focus the processes of distribution and use of sound. But in this direction, "synthetic" claims is more of a "critique" of instruments and traditional research, including electronic, plastic art that belongs to music "educated" and that "popular" and doesn’t seem to characterize a specific field. This brought me to think of Radio as ethical space of sound and special environment of trading cultures and languages of contemporary art.written by: Ilari Valbonesi