Soundings: A Contemporary Score

Museum of Modern Art, New York City. Until 3 November 2013.

Several years ago, a colleague noted similarities between the visualizations appearing on his computer screen when he played Beethoven, and graphs of the time-series data he was recording in his lab from cancer cells and sleeping human brains. Could he play back his data as sound, he asked? Yes: with some clever bit twiddling, you can turn any digital data source into sound, because a digital sound recording is simply a series of numbers. But is it music?

Camille Norment's Triplight (2008), an exhibit in the Soundings show at New York's Museum of Modern Art. Credit: CAMILLE NORMENT AND GASSER GRUNERT GALLERY, NEW YORK

Entrenched controversies surround both the definition of music and the core relationships between sound, music and human perception. The bleeps and buzzes of bioelectrical recordings may sound nothing like Beethoven, but they would not be out of place on a dance-music track, and their structures can be similar to musical forms. Given the ambiguities, many artists working with sound avoid the term 'music' and call themselves sound artists, or simply artists. A wonderful collection of sound-oriented works by 16 mostly young artists is currently on display at New York's Museum of Modern Art. Soundings: A Contemporary Score is the first group show in the museum's history to focus on sound as artistic expression.

Soundings challenges the idea that listening is all about the ears. The rise of recording and playback technologies has left many thinking of sound (from music and audio books to rainforest-relaxation mixes) as best experienced in private through noise-cancelling headphones. But until about a hundred years ago, all sound was environmental: its source was nearby and an individual's experience of it was driven by its social and environmental context. The works in the exhibition entirely dispense with the concept of private, ear-centric listening. Sergei Tcherepnin's Motor–Matter Bench (2013), for example, is rump-centric: a New York City subway bench has been wired up as a large speaker, with the heavy wooden seats filtering the sound. Sit on the bench and Tcherepnin's composition is transmitted through your bottom.

Nearby, Camille Norment's Triplight (2008), pictured, is completely silent: a flickering light inside the hollowed-out shell of an antique microphone casts a beguiling ribcage shadow on the walls, evocative of a smoky jazz club. That such a simple visual gesture can evoke a complex, multi-modal scene is not surprising, given the tangled connections between our senses, perceptions and memories.

Some artists work directly with sound as a physical material, finding ways to alternately elucidate and confound our physical and perceptual understanding of sonic phenomena. In wellenwanne lfo (2012), Carsten Nicolai plays inaudible, low-frequency sounds through four small transducers resting in a shallow trough of water. The rippled interference patterns are reflected by a mirror and presented in an upright, frame-like light box — inaudible sound as a gently undulating abstract photograph.

Tristan Perich's monumental Microtonal Wall (2011) is certainly audible, and what you hear is both exhilarating and deeply confusing. A grid of 1,500 small speakers is mounted in an aluminium frame along a hallway. Each speaker plays a fixed frequency, arranged low to high from the bottom-left to top-right of the grid. The tones span four octaves, and, as expected, the effect of such dense sound is almost white noise. But if you get an ear close enough (and everyone does), you suddenly discover a world of rich physical and psychoacoustic effects: endless microglissandi, wild acoustic beating and bewildering spatial movements. Our wet brains and the messy physical world quickly turn a clean, precise stimulus into a riot of perception.

Christine Sun Kim's soundless works on paper play with the translation of sound and language concepts into visual marks. In Scores and Transcripts (2012), she presents a set of playful but poignant drawn interpretations of American Sign Language phrases and musical dynamics. From a distance, the red swoop of All. Night. (2012) reads as a giant cartoon chin. Pianoiss ... issmo (Worse Finish) (2012) is a classic bifurcation diagram rendered with tiny pianissimo marks. Deaf since birth, Kim's seemingly offhand drawing style belies a rich understanding of the mostly unconscious ways in which sound mediates physical and social relationships in the hearing world.

Jana Winderen takes a literal approach to translating sounds between worlds in her 16-speaker installation Ultrafield (2013). She recorded the ultrasonic clicks, whistles and whirrs of insects, fish and bats, and then digitally shifted their frequencies down into the range of human hearing before mixing them into a densely layered, half-familiar, half-exotic sound world. It's the sound of a science-fiction superhighway running through a shrieking, burbling rainforest. Or maybe the sound of a human brain, struggling to make sense of itself as a species that enjoys shrilling insects and string trios in equal measure.