Soundscapes

Strange exhibition at the National Gallery which commissioned new music and sound installations in response to pictures in the gallery.

As you may know I have issues about sound and how it is presented in galleries but this was done well except for the first piece which was the quietest but was shown in the only gallery which wasn’t sound proofed so you could hear the noise of the gallery as well as the quiet bird song. Maybe this was a deliberate move to compare the background noise you would normally hear with the picture to that which had been recorded but I suspect not!

I wasn’t convinced by some of the pieces. The classical music works were nice but I’d have almost rather have heard music contemporary with the picture. It didn’t add anything for me. I want to go back again having now watched the video about the show and I was intrigued by it but I’m not sure what the music added.

I particularly want to go back to listen to Jamie XX’s pointillist piece to go with a Seurat! I hadn’t understood in the room that the sound changes as you walk around the room and breaks up more nearer the picture in the same way the picture breaks up the more you seen the blobs of paint.

However my favourite room was for the Antonella St Jerome. It’s a picture which seems to fit into every tour I do of the early pictures in the gallery. Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller had recreated the picture as a 3D model which helps to explain the strange architectural space. They have also built a panorama of the landscape outside. The soundscape is then sounds which might be heard in that space, people singing and walking, horses going past and a wonderful bit where someone runs towards you. A really magical interpretation of the picture which I found both moving in itself but also an aid to looking at the work.

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