Berlin
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Considering that the most talked about event of the recent World Cup involved not being able to hear something - the words Italy's Marco Materazzi said to France's Zinedine Zidane before their collision - it's ironic that the organisers in Berlin chose a multi-venue exhibition of sound art to accompany the tournament. Spread around the city in places such as the Academy of Art and the Dresdner Bank Building, fans could give their eyes a break and put their ears to work on some unusual sonic experiences.
Fine art is generally a visual medium - if it's sound, it's categorised as music. But since Karlheinz Stockhausen's experiments with electronic music in the 1950s, the two media have often converged. John Cage's Concerto for Prepared Piano - in which he dropped objects on the instrument to make sounds - was as much performance art as music, while the ambient compositions of the likes of Brian Eno and Harold Budd can be described as aural paintings or soundscapes.
The Berlin sound artists were less rarefied than these innovators. Most of the exhibits, with the theme Sonambiente, were witty, humorous, provocative and occasionally scary. Some were even soccer-related. The best were concentrated in Parisier Platz, behind the Brandenburg Gate, near the 16-metre-diameter soccer ball that was itself an interactive installation.
I'm a little disadvantaged when it comes to appreciating sound sculptures, due to some sonic experiments during my teens and 20s. These included once drunkenly sticking my head into a bass speaker at a concert by the Clash to see what would happen. However, there seems to be enough left of my cochlea to figure at least some of it out.
The installation most directly connected with soccer wasn't the best. You'll Never Walk Alone - Europaische Stadiensounds, an original sound cantata mixed recordings of cheering fans from stadiums all over Europe. It was, to quote the poster, 'a 60-minute sound piece played by 10,000 football fans, recorded in England, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, and Germany'. Unfortunately, that's exactly what it sounded like. Still, the modernist architecture of the domed Dresdner Bank venue was easy on the eye.
Over the platz at the Art Academy, things were a lot better. Belgian artist Kris Vleeschouwer's Glass Works got a lot of attention. This consisted of a six-metre-high stack of shelves crammed with generic glass bottles. Every so often a bottle would fall off, hit the floor, and smash into pieces. Out came an irritated cleaner with a dustpan and brush, who would carefully sweep up stray shards of glass.
Bernard Leitner's Serpentine was equally amusing. It was a winding, metallic tube - big enough to walk through - with small speakers along its length making electronic hisses, a kind of Gollum-meets-Dalek sound. It was like being inside an electronic digestive system after lunch.
But the piece de resistance was Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller's Opera for a Small Room: a room crammed with vinyl-record players, opera records, posters, and other musical paraphernalia, with machines automatically playing snatches of opera, soul and do-it-yourself massage instructions, as the lights faded in and out.
It was all a lot of fun, even for the sonically challenged.
