Noise will be noise

Some call it "experimental," some call it "avant-garde" and some call it "sound art."

Others just call it noise.

That's what Fujui Wang (王福瑞), one of Taiwan's biggest proponents of the style, calls it. The tag isn't pejorative. When Wang, who heads the Digital Art Lab and Computer Music Lab at Taipei National University of the Arts (TNUA), started the nation's first, now-defunct experimental music label in 1993, he called it exactly that: Noise.

Wang and others at the Center for Art and Technology at TNUA have gathered a dozen sound artists for TranSonic 2008, a weekend of performances and artist talks starting tonight at the Guling St Avant-Garde Theatre in Taipei.

Wang and graduate student Yao Chung-han (姚仲涵), who will both perform this weekend, played videos of several artists when I met them in a room brimming with computers, control boards, wires and speakers at TNUA last week.

Normally experimental music brings to mind bleeps and buzzes, TV static and awkwardly silent crowds who burst into nervous applause when each half-hour piece is finally finished, but there's more to it than that.

Nigel Brown, half of the Changhua- based Taiwanese-Australian duo 12 Dog Cycle, says that sound artists use "the sounds of the world around them, electronic sound, modified or self-built instruments, sounds from the body, silence, household or industrial goods and just about every other sound-producing thing imaginable."

"Most of the artists at TranSonic will use computers, but not all of them," Wang says. "And the sound doesn't usually come from the computer. The computer's just used to process the sounds."

Yao amplifies the sounds of fluorescent lights so you can hear the thumping and crackling of individual electrons slamming into the lights' anodes. Tomorrow night he'll be accompanied by the Taiwanese half of 12 Dog Cycle, Alice Chang (張惠笙), whose vocals range from "tiny textures of crackly breath to ear-shattering screams and everything in between," Brown says.

In 12 Dog Cycle's pieces, Chang's vocals are layered with sound by Brown, who uses a computer to "spatialize" drones from a piano accordion.

Other artists will use sound from a wide range of sources, including a machine that produces whistles from bottles, a microphone submerged in a giant fishbowl, and insects.