It's called Sound

Sound is everywhere! A big part of our entertainment filled lifestyle is sound. Usually the sound of music. However, music is not the focal point of 23five, a nonprofit organization that presents the annual festival of sound art. What’s sound but isn’t normally considered music? Pretty much everything else you can hear: recordings, radio transmissions, performances, installations and so much more. The important thing is, there is no limit. I had no idea what to expect at the “Tenth Annual Festival of Sound Art”, yet just the fact that one night in late January it was held at the Exploratorium was mystery enough to check it out. Sure enough I saw and heard some extremely strange pieces of art. The thing about experimental sound is that it’s hard to remember or even process. Your mind just wanders of and I got to a point where I felt sort of in a trance or hypnotized and I had to actively pull my thoughts together and physically shake my head to gain complete consciousness. From the looks of other people’s faces I felt like there was nothing seriously wrong with me since they were behaving in a similar way. I saw a man slap himself in the face, kind of funny actually. Most of the stuff, no actually almost all of it, made no sense whatsoever, but I figured trying to understand it would make my head explode, so I just didn’t. Turns out it’s much easier to just listen instead of making an effort to analyze something that possibly can’t be understood. It may take some time to get to the point where the experience is truly special – it’s when you stop trying to make sound something it’s not and just appreciate it for its randomness. The multimedia art pieces combined sound and video or experimental animation and sometimes lasted 20 minutes or longer, yet they all managed to keep my attention for some reason, and I can’t help but wonder whether sound just has the ability to do so. In the end you ask yourself how and when did what you heard change from a sound that was similar to a door-buzzer to one that might be compared to the enraged ocean crushing against a cliff. If you are one of those people who like to feel the music you’re hearing pounding against your lungs and heart but your neighbor or landlord keeps you from turning up your stereo, if you have no idea what it sounds like to drop a microphone into grass and then play it back over a sound system that would leave most artists in a band drooling over themselves, and not everything has to make sense to you in order to be appreciated, keep the festival of sound art in mind. Just don’t go there if you already have a migraine!