New Sounds
Artist statement
by
Agnes Cameron
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What is New Sound?
Perhaps New Sound is entropically new, like combinations of words in the subreddit /r/brandnewsentence—novel sequences of frequencies yet to be combined.1 It might be culturally new—a sound of an industry or social organisation coming into being, situated in a place and time. Perhaps New Sound is produced by new means, a new technology, or maybe even a new relationship to old technology.
I encountered the idea of New Sound in a YouTube video by the producer Gyu Beats, in which he reconstructs Joey Beltram’s 1990 track "Energy Flash". This track left a huge impression on me—I first heard it at age 19 while studying electronic engineering and running a techno night. I had never heard anything like it. In the video, the producer analyses the track bit by bit, reverse engineering the equipment and techniques used, trying to get to the heart of its strangeness. The video’s conclusion—that Beltram used a combination of idiosyncratic synths and expressive samples, a filter here and a pitch bend there—feels mundane and a bit magical, both embedded in and transcending the materials to hand.
How do you make a New Sound?
I think it’s important to learn about any technology because it is possible to do the same thing in many different ways. This leads to two conclusions: that the medium you interact with is fundamentally material and textural, and that choices you make, even about very technical things, are also aesthetic.
The first appearance I could find of the phrase New Sound is in Bruno Bartolozzi’s 1967 book New Sounds For Woodwind, a manual of playing techniques that extend the textural range of flute, clarinet, oboe and bassoon.2 In the introduction, the author credits the flourishing of research into woodwind sound as the direct result of the development of electronic music: a new world of New Sounds and, as such, a material expansion of sonic possibility across all technologies. Bartolozzi’s methods involve precise and virtuosic manipulations and creative misuses (such as playing the oboe without a reed) to complex sounds by engaging the instrument’s fundamental physical properties. Nearly 60 years on, these approaches still read as exciting and liberatory.
A precondition for a revolutionary approach to technology is an unalienated relationship to it. In an essay celebrating 25 years of the pirate archive UbuWeb, Cristóbal Sciutto asserts that "thinking of tools as instrumental means for achieving fixed goals fails to account for the range of improvisations and 'misuses' that they afford. Rather, it is more productive to consider them as materials which define a space of expression.”3 In this reading, the digital archive, like Bartolozzi’s oboe, is no longer a singular ‘instrument’ but a medium in its own right.
What does extended technique look like for a phone, a laptop, or a large language model? On the surface, this idea of virtuosity is at odds with many of the interfaces that populate our daily lives, many of which prioritise a smooth ease of use over access to the material reality they represent. In their 2023 manifesto, The Computer Is A Feeling, Tim Hwang and Omar Rizwan ask:
Do you dream about your smartphone?
Does it feel like a place that you can inhabit and shape and reconfigure?
Does it give you a sense of possibility?4
It makes a conscious effort to consider the smartphone as a medium. Last year, I participated in an artwork by Reuben Son, which used the audiences' phones to stage a new choral work. The event had a dreamlike quality—created in part by the sonic world created, partly the setting of a summer afternoon by the Ljublanica river—but also in this defamiliarisation of the devices themselves which became collectivised and divorced from their everyday use.5
What are the design principles of an interface that open up a space of possibility?
The design of a medium is different to the singular construction of a tool. Extended technique is necessarily emergent; a response to constraints, mistranslations, noise and error. To account for it as part of an interface faces the same challenge as determining the rules that govern an ant’s nest. What one defines instead is a form of language, a representational mode for a deeper, messier or more complex system.
Many New Sounds of the 20th century travelled not as notes on a page, but as circuit diagrams and later as computer software. The explosion of graphical scores and alternate forms of notation mirror the expansion in a diagrammatic language in physics, electronics, and information theory, transformations in formal representation that changed the fields themselves. In an essay on the net art duo JODI, Alex Galloway asks, “Are mathematicians modernists?”, citing the tendency of mathematics to remake its formal construction constantly.6 This materialist modernism was taken up enthusiastically by composers like Iannis Xenakis, whose chaotic and beautiful works developed both sonic and visual forms for the language of statistical mechanics, a means to, in his own words, “create sounds that have never before existed”.7
The flip side of this representational abundance is a tendency of tools to conform to expectations once a standard use is established. Bartolozzi identifies the almost total lack of expansion in woodwind technique over the 200 years preceding his work as determined by the close relationship between instrumental design and traditional playing techniques. This treated woodwind instruments not as spaces of inquiry in their own right but tools to satisfy the musical requirements of each successive epoch. Similarly, the piece of glass in your pocket that defies many laws of physics is not experienced as such—it has been rendered closed by a series of design decisions that reify a singular mode of use.
Much of the implied use of generative AI—producing something that looks like it was made by a human—is at odds with its material functionality: to massively and cheaply compress and condense information, allowing it to be translated between different spaces and contexts. This fundamentally linguistic and symbolic operation is often masked by the interfaces through which it is encountered.
The AI website generator WebSim is a tool that engages this symbolic layer. 8 Superficially, WebSim is just another image generator, but instead of creating pictures, it creates websites. It feels exciting to use, much more so than image-based equivalents. A possible reason for this is that WebSim generates editable code rather than pixels. This condensed representation is well-suited to the formal qualities of generative AI, as even very simple HTML and CSS can be extremely expressive and transformed easily through small edits. Moreover, WebSim has seemingly not been optimised for making things that look like they were made by a person, allowing the user to lean into, rather than away from, the hallucinatory nature of deep compression.
The effects of website generators have been, in many ways, catastrophic. Websims are boiling the web, churning and remixing it rapidly, rendering it almost unusable in its traditional form. In his manifesto Toward Polymorphous Radio, radio artist Tetsuo Kogawa frames the 1980s explosion of microbroadcasting in Japan as a direct response to the decline of radio as a mainstream broadcast medium. He asks: “If… extreme possibilities are reached at the end of something, what then ends with radio?”.9 We might well ask the same question of the internet.
What, then, ends with computer music?
In a 2018 interview, Sophie asked, "You have the possibility with electronic music to generate any texture, in theory, any sound, so why would any musician limit themselves?"10
There is a reading of this commentary that is very final—why use anything other than a computer when a computer can do anything you want? I choose to read it differently. What one hears in Sophie’s music is the use of technology not as a singular tool but as a medium that can be pushed and changed through use. Her music is unique precisely because she is not distracted by the novelty of the technology but instead is determined to reach its edges. Like the smartphone, it takes a strong commitment to the New to avoid bending to the wishes of what a tool wants to do for you.
To engage our interfaces as spaces of possibility is a political act. There is nothing inherently liberatory or progressive about technology, simply the space of potential. Neither is newness the same as novelty—even the oldest technologies contain a space for the new.
New Sounds must and will always be made!
Toward New Sound!
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