Imagine a Sound That Slowly Dissipates

Prof. Amnon Wolman

The properties of sound, like smell, are dominant: sound – when it is present – cannot be avoided. Different people have different sensitivities to sounds and frequencies, to amplification, to clarity and to sound quality. Artists who make significant use of sound are in fact building on common perceptions and unconscious responses, at least in part.
In his attempt to reflect the world of images, the artist Amnon Wolman presents the world of the imagination, in which melodies are created in the brain on the basis of past and present external experiences, alongside the findings of the researchers who chart the path of the notes between their creation and their understanding and interpretation in the brain towards their transformation into an image.
Sound is the main material from which the artist constructs the works presented in the exhibition. Sound is a broad category that includes music, speech, noises, tone, memories, emotions and more. We hear sound all the time, and label it: some things are important, and some things are not; we label some things as music, and others not. Everything begins with hearing and listening.
The sound in this work also occurs in the viewer’s imagination, the visual noise created by the cables, and the possibility of seeing different images within that visual noise may suggest sounds. Hidden within that visual is also an analogy between the passage of electricity in electrical wires, and the passage of information along the neural pathways in the brain. The wires, which conduct the sound waves and the electricity in the exhibition, remain exposed, and they create a branched network of information processing and recall processes. The absence of any sound in a sound-based work is almost as significant as sound itself. The electric cables that are stretched along the walls and inter-connect  serve as a disturbance in space. Wolman’s visual presentation indicates the image of the voice as present in the gallery space, which becomes, perhaps, a resonant chamber.
A musical instrument built by the artist stands in a far corner of the gallery; its strings when pressed sound a short musical sequence or conversations with four researchers at the center: Dr. Naomi Habib, Prof. Israel Nelken, Prof. Aviv Mezer, and Prof. Yair Weiss. The viewer/listener is invited to connect different bits of music by clicking on different buttons to construct a musical piece.
This exhibition reflects the two main deliberations of the researcher and the artist: one is the transition from experiencing sound through hearing to conscious control of hearing, and the other is the relationship between the personal hearing of an individual and the shared hearing of a group that experiences sound together.

Acknowledgments:

Thanks to the researchers who collaborated in this work: Dr. Naomi Habib, Prof. Israel Nelken, Prof. Aviv Mezer and Prof. Yair Weiss.
To the technicians and musicians who helped in the construction of the work: Noa Frenkel,  Yelin Yafet, and Omer Goldberg;
To Michal Mor, the Curator.

Prof. Israel Nelken

The sound causes vibrations in the eardrum, producing motion in the chambers of the inner ear, where a miraculous process produces electrical activity that represents the sound. The electrical activity in the ear causes activity in the brain. And so we hear. This is the story that appears in the neuroscience textbooks and which we teach our students.
This account is simple and concrete, with a clear and univalent causal connection between each stage of the process and the next; everything is deterministic, leaving no room for differences between listeners.
The conversations with Wolman give rise to a very different picture, one in which the act of hearing is linked in an essential way to the inner world of the viewer, to the categorization of the incoming sounds, to the separation between music and sounds that are not music, to what is important and what is not important, to processes of recall, to energy and information. This is undoubtedly a world which is personal and different for each person who experiences the exhibition.
In our conversations, I tried to explain this difference by stating that I was talking about sensation, whereas Wolman described perception. Perception is built on sensation, but the two are not isomorphic. Perception uses sensations as a raw material that is repeatedly processed and shaped, and may depend on everything that happens or has happened in the past to the viewer/listener. This is the process through which memories and emotions can intervene in the perception of sounds.
Yet, this is not quite an explanation, but rather a process of attaching labels. I know there are places in the brain where the electrical activity faithfully represents the sound, and other places where the electrical activity represents the resulting perception. How this transition happens, and what causes sounds to produce such a rich set of perceptions, these are still a mystery.