Cory Arcangel Orchestral Manoeuvres: See Sound. Feel Sound. Be Sound

Orchestral Manoeuvres: See Sound. Feel Sound. Be Sound brings together 32 composers and contemporary artists from across the world to create a very different kind of exhibition that presents early Sound Art projects, different types of music scores and noise-making sculptures, through to contemporary projects that use digital, drawn and/or hand-made methods to make an object speak or sing.

The exhibition brings together some of the world’s leading contemporary sound artists whose works encourage us to listen more closely to the spaces we live in or visit. These artists ask us to imagine what music can be and how we might create it ourselves.

American artist Cory Arcangel takes a very serious piece of music by Arnold Schoenberg – an Austrian born composer and music theorist widely considered one of the most influential composers of the 20th century – and playfully recreates it by using a series of clips of ‘cats playing pianos’ that he collected from YouTube. This video collage recreates every atonal note from Schoenberg’s avant-garde masterpiece, a work that eschewed traditional harmony and heralded a radical break with classical form.

Arcangel’s work signals a further evolutionary turn in music-making.  We no longer need to be talented or skilled musicians – with the right software we can recreate music and create sounds, we can modulate and change recordings of our own voices, correcting tone and pitch as we feel.