Where Speakers Bleed Colors and Money is Art

By Daniel J. Kushner

The Sound Scores of Andrew Deutsch and Stephen Vitiello

“Click, click…” say the frogs. “Click click click….click.”

Staccato static tickles sound artist Stephen Vitiello’s ears as he walks across a windswept clearing of marshy green just outside the dense alcove of the woods. Trees adorned with audio speakers outline the forest. Vitiello applies pigments of varying shades to the speaker cones, and soon the edge of the wood looks like some audiophile’s strange collection of Christmas trees. The clicking frogs begin a dialogue with nearby bullfrogs, which drone on together like drunken old men singing off-key.

A kind of hyper-reality emerges from the surroundings and the sound that inhabits them; an entirely different drone begins to inhabit Vitiello’s head. It is the drone of pain — the slow, circular slide of waves, swelling and subsiding, piercing and persistent.

Suddenly, as the wind whispers through the trees, a nearly imperceptible sound emanates from the speakers, and colors begin to bleed through the cones. Vitiello notices this, and rushes to place paper over the speakers. The hues released from the pigments ebb and flow. Sounds become visible.

While the scene may play like a dream or a hallucination, it isn’t far removed from what visitors to The Warehouse Gallery at Syracuse University will encounter during its spring exhibition Sound Scores: Paper, Wood, Stone and Glass, which opened April 2. Sound and video artist Andrew Deutsch will join Vitiello for this ambitious show, which features drawings, video, found objects, and the creative input of children, in addition to sound.

The idea for Sound Scores began as a dream for Anja Chávez, curator for The Warehouse Gallery, who, upon encountering Vitiello’s soundscapes, listened to his work for seven consecutive hours. “I was amazed how sound, by itself, could exist,” said Chávez. “The sound became visual material. You would hear something concrete, yet poetic. I thought, ‘I need to share this.’”

The collaborative dynamic of this artistic endeavor is a cyclical call and response, an intuitive process in which the two artists oscillate between divergence and convergence. Chávez recognizes this paradox. The curator likens their relationship to that between a novelist and an artist, one who creates independent drawings inspired by the other’s story. Still, she acknowledges the way the two artists’ ideas coalesce.

“[In terms of the] creative process, it’s a one-person exhibition, in a way,” said Chávez.

Vitiello and Deutsch calls one another in the form of graphic notation, a way of writing music or sound using visual shapes or patterns instead of conventional musical notes, measures, dynamics, or articulations.

In a February 2008 article entitled “Picturing Music: The Return of Graphic Notation,” published by NewMusicBox, Vitiello described the conception of one of his graphic scores: “[I] took some photos of reeds in water. When I looked back at the photos, I could see rhythms and long intersecting drones. More important, I could see a mood, which to me equates very much with a sound.”

Vitiello is inspired by sounds that are intuitive and repetitious, and what he calls “patterns that create a certain tension.” For Vitiello, who suffers from migraines, the tension is personal and visceral.

“When Stephen sent me his graphic notations, he wanted sound to move in a circle as slowly as possible, and modulate up and down in frequency, relating to these headaches he gets,” Deutsch said. “He would like me to create sound that moves around in the surround-sound space the way that pain moves around in his head.”

In response Deutsch made videos called electromagnetic drawings. The images are displayed on small LCD screens, which he has embedded with magnets to create his own electromagnetic fields. After creating sounds based on Vitiello’s sound score, Deutsch then employs a program called After Effects to interpret the sound as visuals: slow-moving, blob-like entities that resemble little balls.

“The overarching theme of my work has been this notion of ‘object-as-energy-point,” Deutsch said. “You have a thing, anything — essential nature or sound — and it should really stimulate some sort of discussion.” For him, one such kind of object is color.

Deutsch’s call: He sent Vitiello a set of collages/scores, along with some specific notes:

Colors and lines — read them left to right or right to left. Shifts in color mean shifts in pitch. Sharp edges can be sharp changes or dead stops before a change.

Red, yellow — high frequency

Blue, purple — mid-range

Green, brown, black — lower frequencies

Or:

You are free to devise your own way to understand them. Have people tell stories about what they see, have people sign what they see and mix them.

Vitiello’s response: He brought Deutsch’s materials to his own eight-year-old daughter, who gave him her personal reactions.

“My daughter tends to be pretty perceptive,” said Vitiello. “I also feel she is young enough that her head is not full of clutter. I figured I’d tap into her impulses and take notes on how to interpret the scores — where to read drama versus calm, noise versus harmony.”

While Deutsch and Vitiello find inspiration in some of the same things, each man’s reasons are distinctly his own. Punk rock became an influential force for both artists when they were young men. Vitiello found confidence in the punk value of “one’s intent and integrity despite [lack of] training.” Deutsch identified with a punk band called Crass that published its own records using a method called “cutting to glass,” in which the music was recorded directly to the mastering machine, without the use of tape, mixing, or editing. “Later that day, the record could be out there,” Deutsch said. “The political statement could be made at the same time the political problem was happening.”

And in a way, Deutsch is cutting straight to glass in Sound Scores, with an economic perspective that Americans might not have considered yet.

“I’m interested in [visual artist] Joseph Beuy’s idea — ‘Kunst ist Kapital’ — art equals money,” said Deutsch. “And the way things are headed right now in the United States with the bailout and the stimulus packages, they’re actually just going to print the money and put it out into the economy.”

In the 1920s, Germany faced a daunting economic crisis when a lack of monetary circulation led to gross inflation. To counter plummeting money values, private citizens of individual towns and villages made their own money, called notgeld, or emergency money. This money, which took the form of prints, lithoprints, and woodcuts, was used for trading products such as bread and beer. Until the rise of the Nazi party, an economy of trade persisted.

Deutsch sees similarities between the two economic situations and envisions a new kind of dialogue about economics. “I’ve been thinking about this problem: What would be a valid currency?” he asked. “It seems to be an indication of emergency, or to point toward a new way of thinking — that capital could be whatever we decide is valuable.”

Deutsch has collected original German notgeld for over four years. By scanning the objects into his computer and selecting particular figures from them, he develops a kind of graphic notation, or sound score, which Vitiello is free to interpret through the use of field recordings. These recordings capture the sound of a particular environment, whether it be the Amazon rainforest or the backwoods of Virginia.

While Vitiello’s intentions are not overtly political, they are no less poignant than Deutsch’s. “I was watching a series of documentaries on photography in which people talked about wanting to draw your eye to new details, new angles, shades, highlights of the everyday,” said Vitiello. “My interest in sound is the same.”

Chávez sees the Deutsch/Vitiello collaboration as a continuation of The Warehouse Gallery’s aims. “I wouldn’t separate aesthetic goals from community goals,” said Chávez. “It’s about experimentation, the process of creativity made visible, and important 21st-century issues made visible.”

Andrew Deutsch and Stephen Vitiello make art that challenges the way we see the world around us. Sound is made visible and the visible is made audible. A vibrant new reality emerges, spilling out colors and aching with sound. Sound Scores: Paper, Wood, Stone and Glass continues through June 6.