Music as design

The incorporation of the sounds of the surrounding world in music is today a familiar phenomenon on the electronic music and audio art scenes, and to some extent also in contemporary music. It is rarer for a contemporary audio or visual artist to use music as the form-giving element for a semi-realistic event or narrative. In a way the phenomenon can be compared to Puccini's operas, or to the ground-breaking dance performances for which the choreographer Pina Bauch became famous, where musicalization produced stylizations fo everyday events. Familiar, readable events were reinforced and relocated by an approach where time, rhythm, harmony, instrumentation, sonority and sound in general were the foundations of the formal structure. In this way a few words, small movements and suggestions of gestural expression could be framed and enlarged so that an audience had its eyes opened to situations in life that are normally overlooked or taken for granted.

In several of the Albanian video and installationsartist Anri Sala's works, which this article concerns, music can also be regarded as the structuring or thematic focus for what takes place before our eyes in the video projections.