In David Dunn’s article entitled “Nature, Sound Art, and the Sacred,” Dunn describes the relation of sound to all living and nonliving things. From Dunn’s perspective, sound itself is a language of vibration that unites the universe in a multitude of ways that are incomprensible by the naked human ear.
Sound allows for a profound method through which humans, animals, and insects communicate and perceive the world beyond sight. Via the work of artists such as John Cage, David Dunn believes that the act of adapting ambient and natural noises into music is manipulating the intrinsically unattainable and ubiquitous quality of sound and shrinking it down to the limiting cultural context qualities that come with the label of music.
To Dunn, sound or even the “musicality” of sound cannot be fully defined or specified under the label of music yet it possess an inherent connection to humanity in the form of culture that has been consistent with every human society that has been discovered. David Dunn’s work focuses on the relation to humanity and nature through sound via soundscape recordings to document such phenomenons.
Through site specific works, David Dunn travels to various locations and records the ambient noises to track the evidence of human and environmental vibrations. One example includes the interaction between the wildlife of nighttime Zimbabwe juxtaposed to the sound of cars passing by down a nearby highway.
David Dunn also utilizes sound to capture playful interactions between humans and nature through electronic vibrations from computers or car engines and mockingbirds. Overall, David Dunn has dedicated his artwork to documenting the immaterial nature of sound in relation to humanity and environment in contrast to the musical sound art works typically characterized by the genre.
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