Sound Art: Sound as Primary Medium in Contemporary Art

From December 2024 to March 2025, visitors to the NTT InterCommunication Center in Tokyo walked through a space enveloped in white fabric. Eight speakers, hidden behind the fabric, produced sound in real time, generated by an AI model trained on over 200 hours of the sound artist Evala's past works. The installation, called Studies for, was not a recording. It was a generative system that created new sound continuously throughout the three-month exhibition, never repeating, never stopping. The artist conceived it as a "new form of archive," a way to preserve his artistic style while expanding beyond his past works. The AI model, SpecMaskGIT, generated eight channels of sound simultaneously, creating an immersive auditory environment that visitors experienced by walking through the space. Read the study at arXiv.

Sound art is art that uses sound as its primary medium. Unlike music, which is organized around composition, performance, and temporal structure, sound art is organized around space, perception, and the physical properties of sound. A sound artwork can be an installation in a gallery, a sculpture that produces sound, a site-specific intervention in a public space, or a recorded piece experienced through speakers. The field emerged in the 1960s, gained institutional recognition in the 2000s, and has since become one of the most active areas of contemporary art practice.

This entry covers the history of sound art from its origins in 1960s experimental music and conceptual art to contemporary AI-driven installations, the artists who defined the field, and how sound moved from the concert hall into the gallery.

What Is Sound Art and How Does It Work?

Sound art uses sound the way a sculptor uses bronze or a painter uses oil. The sound is the material, not a byproduct. A sound artwork may consist of speakers mounted in a gallery, transducers attached to architectural surfaces, field recordings played in a specific location, or live sound generated in real time. What distinguishes sound art from music is not the sound itself but the context and intent. Music is typically presented in performance, with a beginning, middle, and end. Sound art is typically presented as an installation, existing continuously in a space for the duration of an exhibition.

The spatial dimension is what makes sound art a visual art form, even though it works through hearing. A sound installation shapes the gallery space through acoustics. The viewer's position in the room determines what they hear, and moving through the space changes the sonic experience. This is why sound art is often described as sculptural: it creates forms in space, but those forms are made of sound waves rather than physical matter.

A 2025 article in the journal Intermédialités examined the history of sound art in museum contexts, noting that until the start of the twenty-first century, sound had rarely been the focal point of exhibitions and had seldom been placed centerstage in museums. The early 2000s saw a wave of exhibitions devoted to sound art, including Audible Light at Modern Art Oxford and Sonic Boom at the Hayward Gallery in London in 2000, Sonic Process at the Centre Pompidou in 2002, and MoMA's first sound-based exhibition Soundings: A Contemporary Score in 2013. Read the study at Erudit.

Origins and History

Sound art has multiple origin points. The first is the Futurist movement. Luigi Russolo's 1913 manifesto The Art of Noises argued that the industrial revolution had expanded the sonic environment and that art should incorporate the sounds of the modern world. Russolo built intonarumori, mechanical noise machines that produced howls, roars, and crashes, and performed with them in concerts that often ended in riots. The Futurists established the idea that noise could be art, which is the philosophical foundation of all subsequent sound art.

The second origin point is John Cage. Cage's 4'33" (1952), in which a pianist sits at a piano for four minutes and thirty-three seconds without playing a note, redirected attention from the performer to the ambient sound of the environment. Cage's broader influence on sound art was conceptual: he argued that all sound, not just organized musical sound, could be the content of an artwork. His courses at the New School for Social Research in the late 1950s influenced a generation of artists who would become the first sound artists.

The third origin point is the work of Max Neuhaus in the 1960s. Neuhaus was a percussionist who moved from performance to installation. His Times Square (1977) installed a sound work in a pedestrian island in Manhattan's Times Square, producing a continuous drone from a loudspeaker beneath the grate. The work had no label, no sign, no indication that it was art. Most people who heard it assumed it was a mechanical hum from the subway. Neuhaus's work established the model of sound art as a permanent, site-specific intervention in public space.

The 2025 exhibition Hear Here at STUK in Leuven, Belgium, honored 60 years of sound art by presenting and re-creating works from 1970 to 2010 alongside new commissions. The exhibition included historical pieces by Dick Raaijmakers (1970), Christina Kubisch (1989), Edwin van der Heide (2006), and Susan Philipsz (2008), alongside new work by contemporary artists. The curators emphasized the urgency of preserving early sound art, noting that many pioneers from the 1970s and 1980s are now of advanced age or deceased, and their works are not always well managed or archived. Read more at billiesear.substack.com.

Key Artists and Practitioners

Max Neuhaus (1939-2009)

Neuhaus created the first permanent sound installation in the United States with Times Square (1977), a continuous drone emanating from a subway ventilation grate in Manhattan. The work was unmarked and functioned as a hidden presence in the urban environment. Neuhaus also created Aurora (1984) in Melbourne and numerous temporary installations. His practice established the principle that sound art could be site-specific, permanent, and indistinguishable from its environment.

Bill Fontana (b. 1947)

Fontana creates large-scale sound installations that relocate environmental sounds from one location to another. His Sound Sculpture through the Golden Gate (1987) placed microphones at eight locations around the Golden Gate Bridge and transmitted the sounds live to speakers at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Fontana's work treats sound as a sculptural material that can be transported, displaced, and recontextualized, creating what he calls "sound networks" that connect distant places.

Christina Kubisch (b. 1948)

Kubisch creates sound installations using electromagnetic induction. Her Electrical Walks series, ongoing since 2003, provides visitors with special headphones that convert the electromagnetic fields of urban environments into sound. Walking through a city with Kubisch's headphones reveals the invisible electromagnetic landscape produced by security systems, lighting, computers, and transportation infrastructure. The work makes the inaudible audible and turns the city into a composition.

Susan Philipsz (b. 1965)

Philipsz uses her own voice to create sound installations in public spaces. Her Lowlands (2010), a recording of her singing a Scottish folk song installed under three bridges in Glasgow, won the Turner Prize, making her the first sound artist to receive the award. Study of Strings (2001) plays a single sustained note from a speaker mounted in a stairwell at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Philipsz's work demonstrates how sound can transform architectural space and carry emotional and historical weight.

Janet Cardiff (b. 1957)

Cardiff's The Forty Part Motet (2001) arranges 40 speakers in a circle in a gallery, each playing one voice from a 40-voice choir singing Thomas Tallis's Spem in Alium. The viewer can walk among the speakers and stand next to individual voices, experiencing the choir from the inside. The work translates a musical composition into a spatial experience, and it has been exhibited at the National Gallery of Canada, MoMA, and the Cloisters in New York.

Evala (active from 2000s)

Evala's Studies for (2024, NTT ICC Tokyo) used AI to generate real-time eight-channel sound based on 200 hours of his past works. The installation represents a new direction for sound art: using machine learning not to replace the artist but to create a generative archive that continues producing new work in the artist's style. The work raises questions about authorship, preservation, and the future of sound art as its pioneers age.

Sound Art Today

Sound art in 2026 is a global practice with dedicated festivals, exhibitions, and academic programs. The 2025 exhibition It Always Sounds Somewhere at the Beijing Inside-Out Art Museum explored the history of sound practice in China from the 1990s to the present, featuring over 50 works by 57 artists. The exhibition Your Ears Later Will Know to Listen at Nottingham Contemporary (May-September 2025) examined how sound connects with histories, places, and identities, featuring Indigenous and Global Majority artists who engage with sound in complex, layered formats. Read more at Nottingham Contemporary.

The integration of AI into sound art is the most significant recent development. The Evala Studies for installation demonstrates how sound generation AI can create continuous, real-time, multi-channel sound installations that evolve over months. This technology raises archival questions that are specific to sound art: because sound installations are spatial and performative, they are difficult to document and preserve. AI models trained on an artist's past work offer one possible solution, creating a generative archive that preserves not recordings but the artist's sonic style.

See Sound Art in Person

Sound art must be experienced in its installed form, not through recordings. Visit Susan Philipsz's Study of Strings at SFMOMA, which is permanently installed in a stairwell. Look for Janet Cardiff's The Forty Part Motet, which tours internationally. Christina Kubisch's Electrical Walks are available in multiple cities worldwide, with headphones provided at participating venues. For historical work, visit Max Neuhaus's Times Square in Manhattan, which was restored and is active again in the pedestrian island between 45th and 46th Streets on Broadway.

For more on the broader field, read our entries on installation art, performance art, and visual music, or explore our blog post on how to read a painting to learn more about analyzing visual art across different mediums.