Alex Kearney has been delving into the world of sound art for his MA degree and his creative output in Plymouth and the surrounding area. Learn more about Alex and his work here!
Alex Kearney, who is a recent graduate of the MA Innovation in Sound degree at the dBs Institute Plymouth campus, has been delving into some of the non-traditional areas of music for his Master’s degree. Find out more about Alex, what ‘Sound Art’ means to him and what it’s like to be a practitioner in Plymouth and the South West.
Hey Alex! Introduce yourself and your background in music
I'm Alex Kearney. I'm studying the MA Innovation in Sound course here and I did a bachelor’s degree before that in Electronic Music Production. My background is in sound art, which is my current practice. Before that, I did session musician work back when I started playing.
What is it that you like about Sound Art as your practice?
The thing I really like about sound art is the fact you have to engage with it. You have to invest time in it. You have to suspend your preconceptions of traditional music. Maybe it's my personal journey getting to that point where I feel like I've engaged a lot with traditional Western music, if you want to call it that, and all its formats. I like the abstractness of it. I like the size of it. Sound art can be anything from a film score to a soundtrack to a contemporary piece of art, for example, an installation that can involve hardware, or anything like that, which is always good in my book.
What do you like about working as a sound artist in Plymouth and Cornwall?
I like working in Plymouth and Cornwall because it feels like a very intimate scene. There are a lot of practitioners here. Everyone knows each other. It's a really good scene. It's very vibrant. Everyone engages really well with everything and that engages you as a practitioner. It energises you to get out there and do stuff.
How can engaging with sound art help traditional music producers with their work?
I think engaging with sound art as a music producer is a really good, healthy thing to do because it opens your mind to other ways of engaging with sound. I suppose, quite non-traditional ways. It breaks you out of the box, to use that expression. It takes you out of putting stuff on a grid, using a preset and loading a sample in. It forces you to go out and find your own sounds and make your own sounds. My piece of advice would be to go out and collect some sounds you would never use ordinarily, and then do something different with them.
What do you enjoy about performing sound art?
I think putting on an art show in an art space is a really liberating thing to do because it's such a different environment to playing a gig or a music performance. It feels like everything's being scrutinized a lot more and in a completely different way. It makes you up your game because everything has to be spot on. If you could imagine being in a studio and making a track, and then a load of producers were coming in to analyse it and that was the show, it's kind of a bit like that, but the show's on for like a month, so you’ve got people passing all the time doing that. It makes you approach production in a very different way.
How has studying at dBs prepared you for life as a professional sound artist?
Studying at dBs has really, really prepared me well. The modules and the projects you get given are really relevant to the real world. You have to engage with the realities of trying to do something. It could be something dead simple, straightforward and literal, like “Perform Live.” So you get some hardware, and it's like, “Make something of it,” you know, just what you have to do in that environment. It could be a longer project, where it's like, “Put out an album,” or, “Release an EP,” or something like that. But every step of the way, it's all real-world scenarios. It's really good. It's really prepared me very well. It enabled me to get my head around what might be needed.
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