Francisco López

Francisco López. Untitled #223.  From January 13 to  March 2010 

Francisco López, sound artist: Art constructs reality; it doesn’t reinterpret it. It constructs it.

Francisco López: When sounds are icons, which they often are for most people, understanding sound goes in a very different direction and has different consequences than when sounds are a material and an entity in and of themselves. In this case, the sound of a bell depends on the bell, the place, the recording and a thousand more factors. This is the concept of Pierre Schaeffer’s ‘sound object’. A sound object is a sound entity, a phenomenological entity detached from its causes and from representation and symbolism. Walter Ruttmann did this in the 1930s. Even before him, in the 1920s, a ton of things were being done on the radio, constructions with sound editing that tried to go beyond mere illustration in radio programs.

I’m very critical of Cage and I think that 4'33 is irrelevant. It’s relevant to the extent that it investigates the musical setting, of course, but in terms of what’s interesting about music or sound, it’s irrelevant because it’s obvious.
The opposite of what he does is interesting, because it’s interesting that the concept of silence exists in music as a symbol in traditional music scores. This defines it, like the other physical concepts that we usually use are defined.
For example, geometry is possible for things that don’t exist in reality, like circles.

Concepts like silence in music are relative. It’s as if you told someone using geometry – which we all do as we try to make the things around us work – that circles don’t exist in reality and you showed them that. They would answer, “I know, but that’s irrelevant”.
The most difficult part is having a real sound where you recognise something real in it when you hear it and you realise that apart from recognising the real thing, this sound has some phenomenological properties that we can look at. For a long time when it was possible to record, this didn’t happen. This idea of manipulating reality arose in a natural-social way without anyone needing to explain anything. But Pierre Schaeffer formalised it. He went to the base of the problem, which means he tried to create a phenomenology of sound.

There are many categories for defining sound, with different classification systems. There are acoustic classification systems, others that are more emotional, others are referential and then: what are we talking about? It’s impossible to clarify this topic. Michel Chion has written best about this.