Samina’s Blog

Stephen Vitiello

Born: 1964
Birthplace: New York City
Gender: Male
Occupation: visual and sound artist

Stephen Vitiello is a talented person who is an electronic musician and sound artist, which collects works such as independent films, investigational video projects and art settings. He was first a guitarist in punk bands in 1978 when he was 14 years old. After attending college, he studied literature and plastic arts. In 1988, he found a job at an arts center and started becoming successful in his career, creating video and sound art presentations. In 1999, he was asked to record the cracking noises of the 91st floor of World Trade Center’s Tower One, after the Hurricane Floyd. This helped him come across with aesthetic and unique sounds.

“I am interested in the physicality of sound and its potential to define the shape, feel and color of a room. I wish to explore how people receive sound and how I may create a work, with no visual component, that a viewer will be enticed into listening with the attention that they would give to a visual or audio-visual work.” – Stephen Vitiello

The person who had a massive influence on Vitiello’s life was a video artist Nam June Paik. He is the person Vitiello started working with in 1991 and examining his creativity. After coming across with Paik, Vitiello entered into a different world. Nam June Paik is a composer, performer, and video artist who is best known for introducing artists and audiences to the idea of using video for artistic expression. From being a punk guitarist, Stephen changed his ideas into a reconciling path for himself. In wanting to change, Vitiello began to experiment with guitar and electronics, finally focusing on the physical sound, at the same time losing interest in rock.

Like other sound artists, Vitiello also does more than just create sound. He was first a guitarist, and then became interested in video making and movies. While getting involved with different things, artists will be able to experiment with different sounds. These sounds can either be reconciling or irritating, it doesn’t matter to the sound artists. They would investigate them by either listening to them or trying them out themselves.

The difference between him and other artists is that he puts different things together, and is particularly interested in the physical features of sound and its likelihood to describe the beauty and atmosphere of the environment. At the same time with making sound, he also examines them. He listens to different sounds to have an idea of how people receive them and where it’s coming from.

Francisco Lopez

Born: 1964
Birthplace: Madrid, Spain
Gender: Male
Nationality: Spanish
Occupation: Experimental music, sound art

Francisco López is known as the person with creative voice in investigational music. He has recorded over 200 works from great simplicity to high testing noise in over 25 years. It doesn’t matter how high or low the sound is, as long as enough attention is paid. This can be kind of hard because he speaks and does his materials really fast. Francisco’s work has been aesthetic, as he has been honoured for his work twice at the Ars Electronica Festival. Also, in 2006, he won the First Prize for the Sound Art Competition of the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León. He has additionally received 3 honorable mentions in the Prix Ars Electronica in the year 1999, 2002, and 2007.

He has his own way of performing in front of the audience, as he performs in total darkness, or hands out blindfolds to his participants. This helps the people get deeply involved into his sound makings and help them understand exceptionally what he’s trying to create. He has another purpose to blindfolds; not wanting the audience to know what he’s doing. Basically, the whole point of covering the eyes is to get people really involved with the sound. The sound system allows Lopez to have a lot of adaptability for working with the space and the sounds. This gets the people into the sound world he’s trying to create. He calls his work “the exploration of the universe of broad-band noise from the real world”, because his music rises from the nature and the environment around him.

The setup of his performance
The way the room is setup is by placing surround system all around it in a circle outside the seats for the audience. He likes the performance to happen in complete darkness, so the audience has to face the speakers with blindfolds. Also, he performs in the middle of the seats to have control over the circle. The reason for his arrangements is that so the audience can listen very carefully to what sound he is making. Thus, with the intense focus they can discover many different unique sounds that they haven’t heard before. He uses the sounds that he has recorded from before, and processes them in the studio to combine during the live performance in different ways.

“My music is loaded with a multitude of cultural references, from the soundtrack of “Eraserhead” to some sound approaches in Buddhism. Whether or not these are apparent is more a question of perception than of explicit explanation. What is essential to it, though, is the fact that I don’t attach myself to any specific system of aesthetic, conceptual or spiritual beliefs. I think its universal reach potential is dependent upon the individual -more than social or cultural- attitudes concerning listening and creation. Both pop music and rock’n'roll (in a wide sense) are deeply attached to certain cultural references, yet they’ve made their way into the universal reach realm all over the world.” – Francisco Lopez

His influences
The environment has been a major influence on Fransisco’s understanding of the creation of soundworks. The complicating sound environments, their natural richness, the unusual pace of the flow of sound events, are an example. He likes to use dramatically slow changes that happen to the environment, with extreme level changes that occur in it. He has an intense focus on broad-band sounds and their complexity that are all the things people find in the clear reality of nature.

Lopez performs completely differently in comparison to other artists. He likes his performance to take place in a dark room with people wearing blindfolds so they don’t look at him or each other while listening to his sounds. This creates involvement with sounds around them. Something else that is different about him is that he doesn’t believe in attempting to achieve something such as advertising or teaching. He just does what he loves doing without trying to make it noticeable. He is not interested in any theories of description or meaning, and he tries to create a more free world around him.

Lopez also tries to create interesting sounds by investigating and trying it out. Just like other sound artists, his main purpose is to create something that hasn’t been discovered yet. Sound is everywhere, so they all try to bring it out in their own ways. Lopez and other sound artists share a more essential approach and appreciation of the different sounds surrounding them. This is an entertainment for themselves and their audiences. It is also an influence from them to others, as in to never give up on what they love to do and discover something new to show it with the world.

As I began to search for sound artists, Brenda Hutchinson caught my attention the most because I found her work quite appealing, as she makes sounds through the long pipe. This is why I started investigating her work to have a sense of her taste in sound and know what kind of sounds come out of the long tube as she blows on it.

Brenda Hutchinson

Born: June 15, 1954
Birthplace: Trenton, New Jersey
Gender: Female
Occupation: Composer, Sound Artist

I would like to start by introducing Brenda Hutchinson. She has attended University of California, San Diego and earned her M.A. in Music Composition. Hutchinson was interested in sound ever since she was a young girl. She would try out different things to make unique sounds. She is very resourceful because, she found her way of making sound, which is singing into a 9 1/2 foot tube. She was fascinated in sound ever since childhood, as she mentions “I started out, I got a pink-and-white plastic Sony tape recorder for Christmas when I was really young and I used to lock myself in the bathroom and record things.” This shows that she likes to try out new things to invent something of her own. And she has been successful in doing that. Brenda mostly performs at international festivals in New Zealand, Europe, Latin America and Canada.

Hutchinson’s work mainly consists of: dance performances, film, video, radio, and multi-media mutual system with strong usage of language. She has designed sounds she calls “collaborating with strangers.” Hutchinson tells people to create sounds of their own, share stories, and make music. This is what she did while growing up and found that sound is extensively important to people’s lives.

“My artform is sound and performance”.

“Much of my work is centered on creating large-scale experiments in socially based improvisations. I work with sound, stories and performance in order to engage people directly and to ask them to focus on themselves and their own experiences as ways to begin to connect with others. I am deeply committed to understanding people and to bridging gaps among strangers. Through my work I try to find common ground among groups of people or to create situations and occasions for people to find their own.

Sound is my medium. Performance and collaboration are the means I use to engage with others. It is through sound that I explore, navigate and understand my relationships with people and to the physical and social world. I believe in the transformative power of paying attention to sound. Listening without judgment to sound itself is something I learned from music, and I try to transfer that quality of attention to all aspects of my work”. – Brenda Hutchinson

The sounds that emerge from the pipe which is connected to a small speaker, enhanses Brenda’s sound making. It is kind of difficult to keep up with her if we were to imagine and draw these sounds. Both her hands are tightly holding on to the pipe and she blows on it with some air passing through the side of her mouth to create different sounds.

The person Brenda was most influenced by was her favourite artist Etta James. Etta is an American blues, soul, R&B, rock & roll, gospel and jazz singer and songwriter. Her work has been used in many movies, television shows, commercials, and web-streaming services. Just like James, Hutchinson likes to get involved in many different things to entertain people.

She is very similar to other sound artists because just like them her sole purpose is to invent and create new sounds.

The difference between her and other artists is that she invented the Long Tube and makes interesting sounds through it. Brenda likes to get others involved with her if they have sounds, songs or poems to share. She mostly makes low sounds, such as whispers, whistles and wails.