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Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville invents the phonoautograph
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Emile Berliner patents the gramophone
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The Futurist Manifesto is published
The Futurists were foundational for sound art, through their interest in noise and performance, and particularly due to the contributions of Luigi Russsolo. -
Marcel Duchamp creates "Erratum Musical"
Duchamp's "Erratum Musical", a composition made up of three notes selected randomly from a hat -
Luigi Russolo writes "The Art of Noises"
Russolo's manifesto is one of the founding texts for the history of Sound Art. In it, he called for the rejection of musical sounds for what he termed "pure sounds", in the search to recreate the omnipresent din of the modern era. -
Russolo demonstrates his Intonarumori for the first time
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Wassily Kandinsky completes "Composition VII"
Kandinsky was a synesthete who heard colours. Through abstraction he aimed to achieve the same affective and emotional qualities of music. Synaesthesia will come to be a prominent theme for sound art. -
World War I begins
WWI greatly influenced the direction of the early twentieth century avant-garde and its burgeoning sound art. Futurism glorified the aesthetics of war, and yet ironically lost many of their artists to it, as well as their artworks - all of Luigi Russolo's original intonarumori were destroyed. The violent sounds of war were also important for Sound Art, and the war was critical to the formation of the Dada and Surrealist movements, which also used sound as part of their artistic projects. -
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Cabaret Voltaire is founded
Cabaret Voltaire was the home of Dada, a refuge for artists seeking asylum during the war, and a place in which much experimentation with sound and sound art was to take place. -
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Pierre Schaeffer and Jacques Copeau found the Studio d'Essai de la Radiodiffusion Nationale
At the Studio d'Essai, Schaeffer, who is later to be credited as one of the originators of Musique Concrete, begins experimenting with radiophonic sounds. The studio is renamed Club d"Essai in 1946. -
Multi-track recording developed by German audio engineers
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Pierre Schaeffer premieres the results of his "research into noises"
By 1949, Schaeffer's work is known officially as Musique Concrete -
John Cage composes 4'33''
William Marx performs 4'33'' 4'33'' is a legendary work in the history of Sound Art. It calls for a performer to sit at a piano without making a sound for four minutes and thirty three seconds. The work challenged the limits of musical representation, as well as playing with the concepts of sound, silence and music. -
First phonogenes are manufactured
The phonegene allowed composers to significantly alter the speed of sounds, and were an essential instrument to the artist-composers of Musique Concrete -
La Monte Young composes "Trio for Strings"
"Homage to La Monte Young" by Nicholas ClineDescribed by Terry Riley as "a milestone in the history of Western Music" (Brandon LaBelle, 2006, "Background Noise" -
Group Ongaku is founded
"Group Ongaku ("Music Group") was a collective exploring musical improvisation from 1958 through 1962. It was originally an improvisational duo between Shukou Mizuno and Takehisa Kosugi" (Brandon LaBelle, "Background Noise", 2006) -
Yoko Ono begins hosting concerts at the Chamber Street Loft
The concerts at Yoko Ono's loft were core contributors to the Fluxus movement, which often dealt with sound and performance. -
Robert Morris creates "Box with the sound of its own making"
The work consisted of a wooden box, inside of which was an audio speaker that played a recording of the sounds made by the process of buliding the box. -
Philip Corner performs "Piano Activities"
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George Brecht performs "Drip Music"
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Nam June Paik perfomrs "One for Violin"
"Over the course of five minutes, Paik very slowly and intently lifts up a violin in this on-stage action on 16 June 1962 – and then smashes it with one blow on the table. Simultaneously, the lights go up in the auditorium. After the long drawn-out suspense, only one, final sound has been produced by the instrument" source: http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/one-for-violin-solo/ -
Compact Audio Cassette is introduced
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George Maciunas publishes the Fluxus Manifesto
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La Monte Young holds first concert in his "Dream House"
Young's "Dream House"The concert was "The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys". The Dream House was "a home for his work to be heard and experienced, for the Dream House functions to spatially express the musical works by complementing them with [Marion] Zazeela's light installations and allowing the necessary conditions for loud volume and extended listening experience beyond the usual concert setting" (Brandon LaBelle, 2006, "Background Noise", p73) -
Alvin Lucier creates "Music for a Solo Performer"
Lucier's "Music for Solo Performer" By attaching electrodes to the head, instruments and sounds are activated by the alpha waves emitted by the performer's brain. -
Max Neuhaus creates "Drive in Music"
Considered the pioneer of sound installation, in this work Neuhaus installed seven radio transmitters along a roadway. Drivers could tune in to their frequencies and listen to the work as they drove along the road. -
Alvin Lucier records "I am Sitting in a Room"
"I am sitting in a room" "By replaying the recording of his voice back into a room, rerecording and playing back, repeating the process, the work develops into an accentuation of acoustic space whereby the sound source (voice) loses its original shape through the resonance of the spatial situation" (LaBelle, 2006, "Background Noise" p 126 -
Michael Asher contributes his sound installation for the MoMA exhibition "Spaces"
For his installation, Asher acoustically modified an empty gallery space in order to block sound reflection and interference and "silence" the room. -
Vito Acconci creates "Seedbed"
An artwork in which Acconci would hide under a ramp, while masturbating ans peaking though a microphone and amplifier to visitors walking on the ramp above him. -
Bernhard Leitner creates "Sound Chair", 1975
"Sound Chair" was composed of a specially designed chair fitted with four speakers, sending specific sounds to specific parts of the body of the person reclining in it. The sounds including low cello and horn notes, causing vibrations more felt than heard. -
Max Neuhaus installs "Time Square"
Max Neuhaus' "Times Square" "Max Neuhaus’s Times Square is a rich harmonic sound texture emerging from the north end of the triangular pedestrian island located at Broadway between 45th and 46th Streets in New York City" http://www.diaart.org/sites/page/55/1371 -
R. Murray Schafer publishes "Soundscape: The Tuning of the World"
A seminal work in the field of sound design, soundscapes, and sound studies in general. -
First digital compact disc prototype created
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Annea Lockwood produces "A Sound Map of the Hudson River"
The work is composed of recordings from several points of the Hudson River, comprising a sound map or "aural journey". "The 'sound map' is, like all maps, a kind of abstraction of a given place. Yet through audio recording such abstraction plays with the actual a but more dynamically. For recorded sound has the ability to deliver affective transformations to the very place of listening" (LaBelle, "Background Noise", 2006) -
Bill Fontana creates "Sound Island"
The work is composed of 48 speakers mounted on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, which relay sounds from locations on the Normandy Coast. -
MP3 software released for the first time
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Yasuano Tone creates "Solo for Wounded CD"
Solo for Wounded CD The artist purposefully damaged a cd to create a new sound piece. His work uses "noise as a potential for other forms of communication, not of messages but of pure drive, not of content but of form" (LaBelle, "Background Noise", 2006, pg 222) -
Michael Brewster presents his exhibition "See Hear Now"
"Working with prepared audio works (consisting of synthesized sound) amplified in a specially constructed room, acoustically specified in material and dimension, his work drew upon acoustical dynamics to create sculptural experience" (LaBelle, "Background Noise", 2006) -
Janet Cardiff creates "The Forty Part Motet"
The Forty Part Motet by Janet Cardiff The work is composed of 40 speakers, each playing one choral part of sixteenth century composer Thomas Tallis's pem in Alium Nunquam Habui (1556). The speakers are arranged in a large oval, and depending where the visitor stands, he or she can hear a single voice, harmonies, or all the voices unified into one note. -
Christina Kubisch's first "Electrical Walk" takes place in Cologne
"Electrical Walks is a public walk with special, sensitive wireless headphones by which the acoustic qualities of aboveground and underground electromagnetic fields become amplified and audible.The transmission of sound is achieved by built-in coils which respond to the electromagnetic waves in our environment." Kubisch has since produced 46 more walks. http://www.christinakubisch.de/en/works/electrical_walks -
James Webb creates "Aleph"
theotherjameswebb.comJames Webb is a South African artist who has been working with sound for nearly two decades. This is one of his recent works, but one example of a long and influential career. -
Camille Norment presents "Rapture" at the Venice Biennial
'Rapture' at the Venice Biennale The Nordic Pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale presented Camille Norment's 'Rapture', a sound installation that "‘explores the relationship between the human body and sound, through visual, sonic, sculptural and architectural stimuli"
http://oca.no/venice-biennale/venice-biennale-2015.1/
