Creative Agencies in Participatory Sound Art: Two case studies

This article explores the distribution of creative agency between artists and audiences in participatory sound art through the lens of perspective theory. In contemporary creativity studies, perspective is taken to mean the way in which an actor’s perception of the environment is structured by their intention to act. According to Vlad Glaveanu, constructing and taking new perspectives constitutes a necessary condition for creative acts as it reveals new affordances of the creator’s materials. In this article, I investigate the perspectives of sound artists and participants through ethnographic case studies of Katrine Faber’s participatory performance Let Us Sing Your Place and Benoît Maubrey’s interactive Speaker Sculptures. In Faber’s performance, the participants use their voices to recreate the soundscape of a place described by one of them. Maubrey’s sculptures are large structures built out of loudspeakers through which the participants can play their own sounds via Bluetooth, phone lines or directly plugged-in microphone. Analysing ethnographic observations and interviews with artists and participants in the two case studies, I discuss how their perspectives are constructed and communicated through artwork’s materialities. Exploring the particularity of perspectives induced by participatory sound art, I show how it challenges a number of conventional ideas about sound and auditory culture.