Unsound "Bass Mutations" and "Sound Art" Discussions

I had the opportunity to listen to many intelligent people speak on the subject of sound culture. While the topics had prescribed themes conveyed by the titles, I was happy to hear the speakers take wider perspectives that in my opinion seemed to adequately address issues in contemporary sound culture. While I definitely want to take some time to develop my thoughts and feelings from today, I do have a few things I just need to get out.

It was very revealing to hear the phrase sound culture used. Especially on a day when both music worlds and art worlds had a chance to speak. There may be no need to divide these world for much longer (even as commodity).

Panelists during "Bass Mutations" at times spoke of the "health" of the music. It seems there is much room to develop a discourse based on the way sound culture "lives". Of course hearing that "rap is dead" or, as proposed today, "dubstep is dead" seems common, but it's this energy in examining sound culture's health, either as growing or dying, that I'm interested in talking about.

The Sound Art panel began with the term "sound art". This identification crisis continues to pop up around those in sound culture; most importantly with the producers of sound and ideas. However it is this unease that eventually drew one of the best topics in the discussion: How do we talk about sound in art? Christoph Cox raised the question of whether we would use the continuum of discourse in the visual arts to read sound as a sort of initiation to the art world, or if we would use a study of sound culture as an opportunity to create a discourse on all that we haven't been able to talk about in performance, relational art, and other ephemera. Brandon LaBelle's book frequently suggests sound's prevalence in our contemporary conception of culture, something which art should examine as it converses with life and works towards building this discursive field.

People want to know how to talk about a lot of new art, but it's more than a linguistic opportunity, its more alive than that and I feel this special sense of it that artists could inhabit, rather than read. This discourse needs to grow, be alive, and maybe even die when its time has past.