1. INTRODUCTION
The call of this edition begs the question of the ways in which more-than-human may lead to more-than-music, moving artistic practices beyond sonocentrism. Seth Kim-Cohen’s notion of non-cochlear sound art (Kim-Cohen Reference Kim-Cohen2009) explores this idea of more-than-music, reframing a listening of sound art away from the sonic aesthetic and towards the conceptual, reducing ‘the value of sonic pleasure in favor of a broader set of philosophical, social, political, and historical concerns’ (Kim-Cohen Reference Kim-Cohen2012: 3). While this notion holds academic and artistic merit, it does not acknowledge similar explorations in sound art within disabled and d/Deaf communities and developments within disability aesthetics. Works within the disability arts that fit into Kim-Cohen’s non-cochlear sound art have existed prior to the publication of his 2009 text In the Blink of an Ear: Toward a Non-Cochlear Sound Art and have continued to develop since. This article discusses Kim-Cohen’s non-cochlear sound and asks the reader to view it alongside discussions of disability aesthetics and sound art works by Hard of Hearing (HoH) and d/Deaf artists. In doing so, it illustrates how disability art and aesthetics are inherently conceptual and sociopolitical and have not only been forgotten in discussions of non-cochlear sound art, but have also carved their own path.
2. NON-COCHLEAR SOUND ART
Seth Kim-Cohen’s text In the Blink of an Ear: Toward a Non-Cochlear Sound Art (Reference Kim-Cohen2009) asks the reader to consider the notion of a ‘non-cochlear’ sound art, moving the audience away from the aesthetic and towards the conceptual. Kim-Cohen uses Marcel Duchamp’s discussion of a ‘non-retinal’ visual art as a basis for the development of non-cochlear sound art. Duchamp’s non-retinal visual art ‘rejected judgements of taste and beauty’ (Kim-Cohen Reference Kim-Cohen2009: xxi) and, as a response, since the 1960s, visual art has ‘foregrounded the conceptual, concerning itself with questions that the eye alone cannot answer … what once could be comfortably referred to as “visual” art now overflows its retaining walls … The defining features no longer have to do with morphology, nor with material, nor specifically with medium’ (ibid.: xxi). From this position, Kim-Cohen suggests that non-cochlear sound art ‘appeals to exigencies outside of earshot. But the eye and the ear are not discarded. A conceptual sonic art would necessarily engage both the non-cochlear and the cochlear, and the constituting trace of each in the other’ (ibid.: xxi).
Kim-Cohen’s suggestion of a non-cochlear sound art seeks to include any type of text that engages with ideas of sound, presenting itself in ‘any medium: photography, books, lines on walls, mirrors, sculpture, as well as performance, speech, choreography, social practice, and so on’ (ibid.: 157). In a non-cochlear sound art, the extra-musical is deemed to not exist, such that is inherent to the work and impossible to remove when the artist considers the subjectivity brought by the listener, the space of production and reception, the relationship to process and product, the time of making and beholding, history and tradition, mode of presentation, context of performance and so on. ‘Nothing is out of bounds. To paraphrase Derrida, there is no extra-music’ (ibid.: 107). ‘Sound always makes meaning by interacting with other things in proximity: geographic proximity, ideological proximity, philosophical proximity’ (Kim-Cohen Reference Kim-Cohen2010).
In the Blink of an Ear uses various case studies including the work of Pierre Schaefer and John Cage and their relation to the idea of non-cochlear music, suggesting that while both artists expand the palette of sounds that music can use, they still close themselves off to the extra-musical, committing themselves to ‘sounds-in-themselves’ (Kane Reference Kane2012; Kim-Cohen Reference Kim-Cohen2009). It is this move beyond the sound-in-itself that Kim-Cohen shows a commitment to a form of sonic idealism in the sense that sound art works ‘are not to be made intelligible on the basis of their perceptual properties; rather, perceptual properties are to be made intelligible on the basis of their conceptual, social, or institutional aspects’ (Kane Reference Kane2012). Kane further adds that the way to argue against the ideology of sound-in-itself is by demonstrating that sound is always social:
whether notated or improvised, Western or non-Western, Music or Sound Art. Moreover, to say that sounds are social is not to say anything of interest, since that is simply given; everything humans do is part of the ‘cultural lifeworld.’ If one wants to pursue the sociality or culturality in sounds, the point is to specify the relation between forms of sociality and the sounds made. (ibid.)
Beyond Kim-Cohen’s reading of a non-cochlear sound art, further discussion of what this means has been explored in a more literal sense with Riddoch addressing synaesthetic sound, infrasonic sound and auditory imagination (i.e., sound that is not heard in the cochlear) (Riddoch Reference Riddoch2012). Beyond Riddoch’s comments, however, discussion of a non-cochlear sound art has been through Kim-Cohen’s Duchampian lens.
Alongside Kim-Cohen’s Reference Kim-Cohen2009 text, he also put out an open call, curating an exhibition of non-cochlear sound art works (Kim-Cohen Reference Kim-Cohen2010). The exhibit showcased 18 works engaging with Kim-Cohen’s non-cochlear ideas. G. Douglas Barrett’s Violin Tuned D.E.E.D. used Bruce Nauman’s Violin Tuned D.E.A.D. as a conceptual and practical leaping off point, inspiring the tuning of the instrument, with the work ‘inviting a consideration of the issues of property, ownership, and labor currently relevant to music and its institutions’ (Cox Reference Cox2010). Barrett’s work, among others in the exhibition, were not free of criticism with Cox adding that there was a general tendency in the show of ‘grand claims made of behalf of works that could neither support nor provoke them on their own’ using portions of text to do the heavy lifting in the conceptual discussion (ibid.).
Kim-Cohen’s non-cochlear sound leans into the conceptual, and in turn, calls work to engage sociopolitically through sound-related and sound-adjacent language. His discussions of non-cochlear sound, however, disregard the work already done, and continuing to be done in disability arts. In discussing his work on non-cochlear sound, Kim-Cohen says what he is ‘saying may fall on deaf … ears’ (Reference Kim-Cohen2012: 1) when in reality, it is the d/Deaf and disabled audience that have not been considered in his theoretical development. The rest of this article explores disability aesthetics, as well as sound art works developed prior to and after Kim-Cohen’s development of a non-cochlear sound that engage with disability aesthetics and the conceptual and sociopolitical core of Kim-Cohen’s non-cochlear sound.
3. DISABILITY AESTHETICS
Disability aesthetics seeks to ‘emphasize the presence of different bodies and minds in the tradition of aesthetic representation – that tradition concerned most precisely with the appearance of the beautiful’ (Siebers Reference Siebers2005: 542–3). Through Siebers’s development of a disability aesthetic, he acknowledges two goals. First to develop ‘disability as a critical framework that questions the presuppositions underlying definitions of aesthetic production and appreciation’ and second, ‘to establish disability as a significant value in itself, worthy of future development’ (ibid.: 543). While Siebers’ framework focuses on the notion of aesthetic (which appears antithetical to the intention of Kim-Cohen’s non-cochlear sound) a disability aesthetic is inherently social and political. As disabled people use art and disability aesthetics, it marks their increasing political power and is used to ‘counter cultural misrepresentation, establish disability as a valued human condition, shift control to disabled people so they may shape their narratives and bring this disability controlled narrative to wider audiences’ (Abbas et al. Reference Abbas, Church, Frazee and Panitch2004: 1). This notion of a disability aesthetic, rather, exists in tandem with Kim-Cohen’s non-cochlear sound, acknowledging the inherent importance of the ‘extra-musical’, in which context cannot be separated from the aesthetic of the artwork, but is rather wholly tied to it.
Tobin Siebers explores the way disability has been represented historically aesthetically within artwork, using this as a way to reclaim notions of beauty (Siebers Reference Siebers2005, Reference Siebers2008, Reference Siebers2010). Siebers uses various examples of visual artworks in discussing this, reviewing the way disabled bodies have been celebrated within artworks. Looking at the Venus de Milo, Siebers notes ‘when the statue was found, discovered with it was the Venus’s left hand, but it was never attached to the body because it was less finished than other parts of the artwork. The Venus was from her discovery conceived as most complete and beautiful in her fragmentary state’ (Reference Siebers2008: 331). One can observe a similar aesthetic and reading from the Torso Belvedere. The statue itself is badly damaged, yet Michelangelo declared no work be done to restore it as it ‘is the work of a man who knew more than nature’ (Barkan Reference Barkan1999: 200) with art critics celebrating incompleteness, for example ‘the sculpture stirred the beholder to powerful feelings because it was incomplete’ (Siebers Reference Siebers2008: 331; Winckelmann Reference Winckelmann2005: 527–9). While these works do not intentionally represent disability ‘a retroactive reading of disability … recoups any semblances of disability in past works and demands that they be viewed anew as avatars of disabled people’ (Siebers Reference Siebers2008: 336).
We could view Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting in a Room through a similar retroactive lens. In discussing Lucier’s 1969 work, Kim-Cohen addresses Lucier’s stutter within the initial recording citing Brand LaBelle as claiming ‘the stutter drives the work … is the very heart of the work’ (Kim-Cohen Reference Kim-Cohen2009: 119; LaBelle Reference LaBelle2006: 126). Kim-Cohen points out, however, that not all versions performed by Lucier involved his stutter and that the stutter is not directly referenced in the I Am Sitting in a Room text at all, questioning the intentionality of the stutter in the performance. In Kim-Cohen’s reading, Lucier’s stutter is viewed as a sonic component of the work, contributing to its aesthetic appreciation. Much in the way the Venus de Milo and the Torso Belvedere are viewed through a retroactive lens where disability is celebrated, so too is I Am Sitting in a Room.Footnote 1
Viewing these works through this retroactive lens has allowed for development of new works exploring disability aesthetics. Marc Quinn’s Alison Lapper Pregnant (a collaboration between Quinn and Lapper), sees Quinn create a sculpture of Lapper who was born without arms, had foreshortened legs, and had previously represented herself as ‘the next incarnation of the Venus de Milo’ (Siebers Reference Siebers2008: 334) in a self-portrait photography project. On a second glance the viewer may notice Quinn is not mimicking the Venus de Milo or the Torso Belvedere, but rather representing a disabled body.
Quinn’s work sees disability aesthetics in a constant dialogue: not only can works be viewed within the context of disability aesthetics through a retroactive lens, but new works can be conversational with that history. Works engaging with disability aesthetics do not have to, however, explicitly engage with these disability aesthetics that arise both through a retroactive viewing and through the artistic aesthetic outcomes of a disabled bodymind.Footnote 2 Disability art inherently displays a disability aesthetic and is underpinned by the experiences of being disabled (Berger Reference Berger, Bones, Smartt Gullion and Barber2022). By its very nature, disability art, whether engaged in a retroactive dialogue with previous artistic works or not, is political and social, and conveys a disabled aesthetic. The political, the social and the conceptual cannot be separated from disability art and aesthetic, again illustrating its parallels with Kim-Cohen’s non-cochlear sound.
The literal suggestion of a non-cochlear sound seems to point towards a sound that does not require hearing, as suggested by Riddoch (Reference Riddoch2012). And while Kim-Cohen is not trying to draw the reader into conceiving of the non-cochlear in the literal sense, but rather privileging the conceptual over the aesthetic, there is a history of works by d/DeafFootnote 3 and Hard of Hearing artists and works that engage with issues of hearing through a d/Deaf and HoH cultural lens that align with Kim-Cohen’s non-cochlear sound as well as a more literal reading of the term. By nature, works that engage with disability aesthetics through engaging with issues of hearing through a d/Deaf and HoH lensFootnote 4 are social and political artworks, placing them comfortably within Kim-Cohen’s scope and understanding of non-cochlear. Yet, these works and disability aesthetics have been left out of Kim-Cohen’s discourse, while closely tied with his ideas.
4. SOUND ART WORKS THAT ENGAGE WITH D/DEAFNESS
There are a range of works that engage with sound and disability aesthetics that fit within the scope of a non-cochlear sound art exhibited both before and after publication of Kim-Cohen’s In the Blink of an Ear in September 2009. This section discusses key works created prior to Kim-Cohen’s text while also looking at the extensive developments that have happened in this field in the last decade separate to the discourse of a non-cochlear sound.Footnote 5
4.1. Pre-In the Blink of an Ear
Deaf artist Aaron Williamson’s 1999 performance art work Phantom Shifts critiques the tendency to link the sound of the voice with hearing (Kochlar-Lindgren Reference Kochlar-Lindgren2006). In the first section of the work, Williamson enters the space carrying a ‘large white plaster model of an ear on his back’ (ibid.: 429) with the weight of the ear bearing down on him over time. The trajectory of the section begins with Williamson only slightly weighed down by the ear with the end of the section seeing Williamson crawling on the ground, buried under the ear. ‘There is a soundtrack of Williamson’s breathing that plays during this section, but also intermittently cuts off, as a way of recreating the liminal space between hearing and deafness’ (Kochlar-Lindgren Reference Kochlar-Lindgren2006: 429). Williamson’s work explores his Deaf perspective through this intersectional sound art/performance art lens.
Russell S. Rosen explores the way sound is used within American Deaf literature:
In [authors’] descriptions of sound, the writers convey their perceptions, images, and experiences with sound and apply them in their descriptions of the literary environment such as objects, events, characters, and settings. In contrast to the hearing writers’ representations of sound, American Deaf and hard-of-hearing literature contains representations of sound that are not in keeping with the American hearing literature. Deaf and hearing writers assign sound with different representations. (Rosen Reference Rosen2007: 553)
The author’s way of representing sounds differs from that of hearing authors, changing not only the way sound is used as a textual device, but also the role of sound and the meaning of the text. This disability aesthetic represents an understanding of sound beyond a hearing aesthetic that disregards the hearing world and carves its own sound path.
Joseph Grigely’s 1991 work White Noise engages with discourse of conversations from his deaf perspective (Adam Art Gallery 2002). Grigely displays the raw materials of written conversations ‘that take place in his daily life; the scraps of paper on which hearing people have written notes, names or phrases in order to “converse” with him when he cannot read their lips’ (ibid.). These notes and papers are displayed on the wall and through this text-based wall piece and through the ‘recording and objectifying the everyday banalities and fragments of spoken dialogue, Grigely transforms auditory phenomena into a compelling visual language’ (ibid.). Grigely’s work examines his relationship to the intersection between sound and visual communication.
In April 2009, Wendy Jacob ran a conference called ‘Waves and Signs’ where a workshop was run on ‘felt sound’ to explore breaking down the hearing/not-hearing binary (Friedner and Helmreich Reference Friedner and Helmreich2012). For the workshop, Jacob had a 12×12 foot floor platform built through which sound and infrasound was transduced. The floor was used as a platform, instrument, and stage for three parts of an event. The first part saw it used as a platform for dialogue (speech and sign) between scientists, designers, artists and students. The second part of the event saw it used as an instrument for resonant vibrations and the final part saw it become a stage for performances for a silent dance party. The ‘project [was] part of an investigation of the politics of experience’ (Center for Advanced Visual Studies, 2009).
All these works and readings engage with the sociopolitical space of hearing through sound-associated language and aesthetics, and in turn, convey a disability aesthetic. They do so through various media (performance art, literature, installation, live performance) and pose questions to the audience about the malleability of the role of hearing within sound art. The works, when viewed through a sound art lens fit within the conceptual scope of Kim-Cohen’s non-cochlear sound art. While the medium varies from work to work, and strays from traditional sound art presentation, the works still engage with sound discourse and fit within Kim-Cohen’s broad definition and scope. The works also illustrate that these conceptual, sociopolitically engaged ideas were already strongly engaged with in d/Deaf and HoH art spaces and demonstrate the traits associated with both disability aesthetics and non-cochlear sound art, before the publishing of Kim-Cohen’s ideas, pre-existing the development of non-cochlear sound. In the decade following Kim-Cohen’s Reference Kim-Cohen2009 text, we see significant development in the space of sound art by d/Deaf and HoH artists, developed outside of the context of Kim-Cohen’s work and heavily engaged with disability aesthetics, yet still fitting within the umbrella of non-cochlear sound art.
4.2. Post-In the Blink of an Ear
There have been significant developments across the 2010s within sound art by d/Deaf and HoH artists that engage with hearing and work that engages with a d/Deaf and HoH perspective. By nature, these works can be described as having a disability aesthetic and fall under the description of non-cochlear sound art as well.
Deaf sound artist Christine Sun Kim’s work spans mediums including installation, drawing, performance, video, text and more. Sun Kim engages with ideas of sound from her Deaf perspective, combining references to the body, musical notation, written language and American Sign Language (ASL) (Whitney Museum of American Art 2018). Sun Kim’s installation work 4x4 (Sun Kim Reference Sun Kim2015) uses subwoofers to play infrasonic frequencies to make elements in the physical environment move (e.g., window panes, people’s drink glasses, light). The use of non-audible sound democratises the audience space, making it accessible for listeners of all types of hearing. Sun Kim’s work bounce house tokyo (Sun Kim Reference Sun Kim2017) explores similar ideas as a dance party with sounds below 20Hz, drawing the audience towards the physical feeling of the inaudible sound. Her fingertap quartet (Sun Kim Reference Sun Kim2014) is a ‘work which consists of four sound files she created using an audio recorder, laptop, and transducers. During the performance she [communicates] the concept of each sound by typing in large projected text on the wall behind her for the audience to read and experience’ (ibid.). The artist performs the sounds in an inaudible way to be interpreted visually by the audience.Footnote 6
Liza Sylvestre’s drawing work engages with sound directly from her Deaf positionality. Her collection Music from Christopher (Sylvestre and Jones Reference Sylvestre and Jones2019) sees her compose a series of drawings based on her listening experience of musical works sent to her by her collaborator Christopher Jones. Sylvestre listens to these musical pieces from her Deaf perspective, having a very different listening experience to that of a hearing individual before interpreting the work through drawing. Music from Christopher interprets the auditory and visual aspects of musical pieces, merging them into a hybrid portrayal that encapsulates both the work itself and Sylvestre’s Deaf encounter with it through written descriptions and drawings. When only observing the illustrations, the music’s sound is omitted, providing the viewer solely with Sylvestre’s linguistic and artistic impressions.
Deaf musician Myles de Bastion curated the exhibition Sound Beyond the Auditory (Reference de Bastion2016–17) where the items exhibited explore cymatics (the process of making sound visible and tactile). The exhibit showed a range of works, from mechanically simple to electronically complex, but all were made by members of the Portland non-profit CymaSpace, founded by a ‘collective of artists and technologists who are d/Deaf or hard of hearing’ (ibid.). The work not only engages with d/Deaf and HoH communities to explore new sound experiences, but also follows the ‘nothing about us without us’Footnote 7 sentiment common within disability and d/Deaf arts and advocacy spaces (Charlton Reference Charlton1998).
Darrin Martin is an artist who has hearing differences.Footnote 8 Martin’s Reference Martin2020 installation video work Ancestral Songs presents ‘large video projections of expansive pastoral scenes, while handheld viewers hang from the ceiling several feet above the projection wall’ (Martin Reference Martin2020). Inside the stereoscopic veiwers are interior spaces. ‘In each set of imagery, hands enter the frame holding hearing aids left by the artist’s deceased relatives, which are cupped to initiate audible feedback. The silent large projections are closed captioned to describe all the environmental sounds the images once contained’ (ibid.). Meanwhile, the stereoscopic viewers emanate audio that bleeds into the presentation space: ‘The work activates an inversion of assistive listening devices as they are used to derive sound in defiance to the ways in which those with deafness can become silent participants in a hearing world’ (ibid.).
Various other artists since the publication of Kim-Cohen’s In the Blink of an Ear have explored the intersection between sound and hearing from a d/Deaf and HoH perspective. These works build on the disability aesthetics developed in the works discussed prior to the publication of Kim-Cohen’s text. While they fit very comfortably within the definition of Kim-Cohen’s non-cochlear sound art by traversing types of media, prioritising the conceptual over the aesthetic (where the aesthetic is often a result of the conceptual or political statement being made by the artist), and often not being fussed with the audibility of sound (and in some cases actively avoiding audible sound), these works have been developed outside of a discourse concerning and involving non-cochlear sound.
5. CONCLUSION
Kim-Cohen’s In the Blink of an Ear aimed to encourage a rethinking of approaches to sound art and suggested that while the rest of the art world had moved towards the conceptual and away from prioritising the aesthetic, the sound art world had been more reluctant to do so. Spingboarding from Duchamp’s non-retinal visual art, Kim-Cohen expresses the importance of the extra-musical, suggesting it is as much a part of the music as the audible composed sound. ‘In order to hear everything sound has to offer, we’ll have to adjust the volume of the ear, listening not at or out the window, but about the window. After all, about the window is the world’ (Kim-Cohen Reference Kim-Cohen2009: 262). This repositioning of the audience’s and artist’s viewpoint considers the conceptual and sociopolitical. Left out of Kim-Cohen’s discussion, however, is a discussion of disability aesthetics and how art-making within disabled and d/Deaf spaces has a history of being inherently conceptual and sociopolitical. The literature about non-cochlear sound art does not mention disability aesthetics and sound art from a d/Deaf and HoH perspective, and similarly, disability aesthetics and sound art from a d/Deaf and HoH perspective have not referenced Kim-Cohen’s non-cochlear sound art when discussing relevant works.
In the Blink of an Ear does not mention that d/Deaf artists have long been making work that fits under the guise of ‘non-cochlear sound art’ without framing it as such and have continued to do so after the publication of Kim-Cohen’s text. The 2010s has seen d/Deaf and HoH sound art bloom with artists such as Christine Sun Kim, Darrin Martin, Liza Sylvestre, Myles de Bastion and others creating sound art work that traverses medium and embraces disability aesthetics.
One may be tempted to suggest that these works fit under the scope of non-cochlear sound art, as they fit within the definition of the term and sound art from a d/Deaf and HoH perspective could be seen as a category within non-cochlear sound art. However, this framing gives non-cochlear sound art privilege over these works created from d/Deaf and HoH perspectives while non-cochlear sound art has never acknowledged the work created within disability aesthetics. Framing these works within non-cochlear sound art may walk towards forgetting that disability and d/Deafness were never acknowledged within In the Blink of an Ear, removing power from these works. If one were to not talk about these works under the umbrella of non-cochlear sound art, however, one may run the risk of disability and d/Deafness continuing to be left out of critical and theoretical development within sound art. With these issues considered, one may suggest that the works are discussed as being ‘examples of non-cochlear sound art from a disability aesthetics context’. This phrasing helps to re-evaluate the initial reading of non-cochlear sound art by including these works within the discourse, while reminding the audience of the context from which they come, existing prior to the existence of Kim-Cohen’s term. As Tobin Siebers looks at art retroactively, changing historical framings, one can too look at Kim-Cohen’s non-cochlear sound art through a different, more inclusive lens.
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