The Tenacity of Sound: Artists working with sound in the Philippines
With a thriving landscape of sound practice in the Philippines, the tenacity of sound is here to stay.
Written by Chesca Santiago
July 30, 2023
By its nature, sound must necessarily be active. Its existence presupposes motion—traveling, oscillating, and finding its way to our ears, lest it gets lost in the vacuum of time and space. And as artists and practitioners working with sound have long shown, a bit of tinkering with frequencies and tenors can make us do a lot more with the medium.
In the Philippines, sound practice has been described by curator Dayang Yraola as a constantly emerging field of various current and arising forms. Yraola veers away from determining an exact definition for sound practice, but she employs the term “to invoke electronic, experimental, noise music and sound art collectively.”
Through an ever-evolving repertoire that goes as far back as the 1990s, sound practice today remains as vital as back then. Without neglecting the institutional challenges that perpetually beset them, adduced by new media artist Tad Ermitaño elsewhere, artists and practitioners working with sound continuously uphold the possibilities of the medium. In this feature, we look at the process and practice of artists and collectives who demonstrate that sound can carry more than just vibrations—but our lives, histories, and even demands for justice and solidarity, among others.
With radios only playing cricket sounds inside the white box of a gallery, Corinne’s installation 59.59 (2020) was also trying to engage or challenge our nostalgia and personal memories with transistor radios. Media courtesy of the artist.
1. Corinne de San Jose
Multidisciplinary artist Corinne de San Jose discovered her interest in sound following her career as a film sound designer. It is why her works, often exploring silence and the female body through sound installations, are constructed in a practice that melds filmmaking, photography, and multi-layer/multi-track systems together. In describing her process, Corinne explains, “I think in my head I start with a narrative that I pick apart, simplify, or abstract. Then it’s just assembling a sort of mise en scene for a “movie” that’s not necessarily bound by a timeline, in the sense that there’s a beginning-middle-end, and occupies a 3D space.”
Corinne’s sound installations are akin to movies constituted by discrete scenes that contribute their individual meanings to the intention of the entire piece. When combined, these singular components, be they a found object, a sound clip, or a film snippet, put forward an entirely new narrative—one that rests on our personal stories and memories, such that it moves us in ways unique to us each. For Corinne, this is where the utility of sound comes in—that “ubiquitous thing most of us don’t pay attention to. It’s pervasive, omnipresent, tactile… affecting us in ways we aren’t even aware of. In that sense, it’s very powerful.”
Jett Ilagan recording the sounds of Manila's busy highway. Behind the scenes of the Sound of X project. Image and caption courtesy of the artist.
2. Jett Ilagan
Jett Ilagan, also known as escuri, is a sound artist and music producer who explores urban life through sonic means. Although Jett takes off from the acoustic, his practice situates urban soundscapes more broadly by using them to signify more than just our auditory experience. Hence, his works take forms that bridge the sonic and visual, such as sound installations, graphical notations, and other audio-visual projects.
In Jett’s previous projects, we saw the soundscape of cities like Manila and Leipzig embossed on paper, metal sheets, and other visual materials. This practice that transcends mediums, explains Jett, is an attempt to meld layers of narrative together into a single yet rich experience. By mobilizing the “rhythm, dynamics, melody, and timbre” of urban life, Jett weaves a “system where our day-to-day activities happen, revealing whether it is harmonious or chaotic,” as he explains.
Graphic Notation of Leipzig’s diverse sonic landscape in form of Embossed prints. Image and caption courtesy of the artist.
3. Kulagu Tu Buvongan
Kulagu Tu Buvongan is a collective that uses sonic ethnography to call for justice for the environment and people of the Pantaron Mountain Range in Mindanao. Expressed in modes including participatory performances and sound installations, the collective documents the community’s experiences against a backdrop of militarization, environmental plunder, and red-tagging.
Kulagu tu Buvongan's "For every name, a forest", with other sound works by Patricia Cadavid, Alejo Duque, Laura Weisner, and Adriana García Galán at the "Radiochispa (Sounding Sparks)" exhibition in Estación Terrena, Bogota, April 2023. Image and caption courtesy of the collective.
For many indigenous peoples, sound is a crucial account of the community’s histories, struggles, and lived realities. The collective explained that a whistle, for instance, can signal fellow hunters, hunt for prey, or call one’s neighbors. And in the context of political violence, sound acquires new meaning—in danger of being lost along with the life it signifies, yet also a weightless companion for the displaced. Stored in memory, “sound archives carry no added weight like printed tomes, and can be carried in silence until the time is ripe to sound them again,” the collective shares.
Names of Manobo animals frequently heard in the group’s acoustic community life. Image courtesy of the collective.
Comprised of both indigenous and non-indigenous members, the collective derived its name from kulagu, an endemic bird sacred to the Ata-Manobo and Tinananun peoples characterized by its very loud calls. Like the forest bird, the collective hopes “that [their] calls and artistic actions would reach far and wide, like the kulagu’s calls.”
Anjeline de Dios in a sonic meditation session in Hong Kong, 2021. Image courtesy of the artist.
4. Anjeline de Dios
Trained as a cultural geographer and visual performer, Anjeline de Dios began her involvement with sound through music. Today, her practice has been moving towards sonic spaces of art-making and healing in forms such as live chants, performances, and sound-based meditations.
For Anjeline, what makes sound a potent medium for her intent is its simultaneity, how “it locks together and transcends the polarities that we typically hold apart through conceptual or rational thinking.” Approaching healing as an event of becoming whole, Anjeline taps into the capacity of sound to heal as it traverses oppositions—being “material and symbolic, mundane and mystical, internal and external, intimate and collective” at once—in order to shape personal and collective subjectivities.
Tad with ‘Bell.’ Image courtesy of the artist.
5. Tad Ermitaño
As early as the 1980’s, Tad Ermitaño has been a key and pioneering figure in new media art* in the Philippines and Southeast Asia. Informed by his background in science and philosophy, Tad’s practice is often an exercise in connecting contrasting concepts and technologies—the kind that snowballs into both visceral and metaphysical inquiries.
Take, for example, his project Bell. Starting off by relating 60 cycle hum to lightning, fire, bioelectricity, and the nervous systems of cities, Tad explains that Bell’s conceptual lineage expanded into “animism and the interconnectedness of things, and how the idea that technology is the opposite of nature is a mistaken notion.” Sound is “more somatic, physical, and intimate than sight.” And for Tad, it is what makes it a fertile medium for notions such as these that are better felt than intellectually perceived.
If there’s anything to glean from the processes and practices we have explored, perhaps it is that sound is tenacious—in the sense that is determined enough to travel, oscillate, and be heard against the fatal threats of vacuums. Firm enough to carry histories, lives, and cosmic inquiries past mere vibrations of the medium. And with a thriving landscape of sound practice in the Philippines, the tenacity of sound is here to stay.
