Some randomly selected term definitions for VISA 2B07

1. Term definition review

2. Accidental Poetry
• Tristan Tzara
• Instructions on how to do this are in his
“Manifesto of Feeble and Bitter Love” (1920)
• Shows how chance is used to produce a text-
you’re not creating conciously/sub-conciously
• The use of nonsense; artist as creator is an
obsolete idea, re-definition of what is art,
rational, enlightened world that created a world
can only be countered by the noise and chaos
of dada
• More death of the author/artist as creative
genius

3. Optophonetical
poetry

4. Optophonetical poetry
• Haussmann’s invention
• poetry that presented random sequences
of letters as phonetic sounds
• Graphically it’s like a musical score-the
fonts and sizes chosen randomly though
by an outside typesetter-death of
authorship
• First ready-made poems for the above
reason

5. “The Art of Noises”
• Written in 1913 by Luigi Russolo
• Is a Futurist manifesto
• Six Categories of noise-sound:
• 1) Roars, Thunderings, Explosions, Hissing roars, Bangs, Booms
• 2) Whistling, Hissing, Puffing
• 3) Whispers, Murmurs, Mumbling, Muttering, Gurgling
• 4) Screeching, Creaking, Rustling, Buzzing, Crackling, Scraping
• 5) Noises obtained by beating on metals, woods, skins, stones, pottery, etc.
• 6) Voices of animals and people, Shouts, Screams, Shrieks, Wails, Hoots,
Howls, Death rattles, Sobs
• Sought to change music to reflect the reality of the
machine age-something that the Futurists totally
supported

6. Musique Concrete
• Sound being manipulated-looping, sampling,
slowing down, sound collage
• Musique concrete begins with the concrete-the
raw sound material, and uses the above
techniques, and turned into a composition
• Not using traditional instruments, following
traditional rules for music
• Acousmatic situation: listen to something without
the knowledge of where it’s coming from, or
what produced it (instruments/perfomers)
• “Pure acoustic world”-beyond our habits and
conventions

7. “I am sitting in a room”
• Alvin Lucier, 1970
• Opens up the domain of conceptual art
(where the idea is more important than the
end product)
• The room is playing the role of an instrument;
the architecture of the room is a type of
technology
• Interaction of the words he’s saying (text) and
the room (space)

8. Psychoacoustics: or what is
sound if no one hears it?
• The listener’s body completes the work
• We have a subjective response to
everything that we hear; what we hear
depends on how it’s presented to us
• What is the relationship between what we
hear (sound), what our brain does with
what we hear and how we
psychologically deal with what we hear

9. Plunderphonics
• John Oswald
• Hyper-sampling
• Culture-jamming
• Appropriate not only sounds but their
contexts-so he’s playing with everything
you’ll remember when you hear a
particular song, using those memories
as artistic media

10. Paranoic-critical method
• Dali’s own words for his own technique
• A concrete image of a completely irrational
reality; painting with precision (as if it were
real…) something that you actually dreamed
• Materializing concrete irrationality
• Subconcious appears just like the exterior
(normal) world does
• Make the subconcious world just as
real/valuable/important as the rest of the world