The sounds also could sometimes work directly on other senses, as in Morton Feldman's Intersection, which had some scratchy, itchy sounds that actually made me start to itch; in Joseph Anderson's Rodeo Beach, which consisted mostly of various wave sounds that convinced me several times that I was about to get wet; and in Rudy Trubitt, Die Elektrischen, and Bruce Kobal's Exciting and Unexplained Cleaning Events, which had loud, very low sounds that literally made the floor shake.

Many of the pieces had a specifically science-fiction-movie-soundtrack feel to them, with lots of electric, alien, and shooting spaceship kinds of sounds. It was like a science fiction movie in abstract form: the gestures were all there, but with no specific storyline or characters or machines, leaving that up to the audience's imagination. I found it interesting that most of the pieces favored these sorts of harsh metallic sounds – even many of the pieces based on found sounds – and I wondered why this was. Are these kinds of sounds simply easier to make and manipulate? Or is there something in the “electronic” aesthetic sensibility that tends to be drawn to these sorts of sounds? The few pieces that did use softer, gentler, warmer sounds did so very effectively and proved that today the technology has no inherent bias in any particular aesthetic direction. I hope that these other aesthetic possibilities will be explored and developed further.

The greatest surprise was the deep emotional impact that some of the pieces had on me. Pure sound can hit you in a primal, gut way that eludes what we normally call music, with its stylized and controlled melody, rhythm and harmony. George Cremaschi's End of Hope was loud, violent, and aggressive, a more immediate and inescapable vision of despair than I've found in the darkest works of Shostakovich or Schnittke. In the aforementioned Rodeo Beach, the waves got so loud and intense at one point that I could really feel the full, awesome power of the ocean, and for the first time, in spite of having previously seen videos and pictures, I imagined that I could really feel the terror of those who experienced the recent tsunami.

Ava Mendoza's The Mind Electric at one point had some extremely high harsh, loud sounds, intense, painful, all-consuming, searing through and controlling my mind so that I could think of nothing else. Martin Stig Andersen's Sleepdriver, on the other hand, was soft and gentle, with a low rumble over which different colors were layered. I don't understand why or how, but this rumble became deeply moving and emotional for me. I felt like a scared child being tenderly comforted by this warm surrounding rumble — like an unborn infant in the womb, safe and protected, never wanting this enveloping sonic fluid to disappear. It's odd to see myself writing such things, but there's no other way to describe the deep, primal way these sounds acted on me – basic, deep-seated emotions of violence, fear, helplessness, and tenderness.

There were many other noteworthy pieces, too many to describe them all. While some were more effective than others, the only one that really didn't succeed for me was Douglas Quin's Weddell Seals Underwater. The piece is one uninterrupted segment of underwater recording of Weddell seals in the Antarctic. Certainly these animals make quite unusual and surprising sounds; but as art, without any manipulation, it gets very boring very quickly. It was like watching a nature documentary (or worse, a reality show) without any narration, storyline, or editing. Plenty of the other pieces used found sounds – waves, traffic, songs, etc., but they did something with these sounds, messed with them in some way.

This does bring up an important distinction: I would contend that not all sounds are inherently art, contrary to what John Cage would assert, but that all sounds, not just “musical” sounds, can be material for art. Indeed, “musical” sounds as we traditionally think of them are only a small subset of the many sounds out there that can be used to make art. And perhaps the art of music itself is merely a subset of the broader art of “cinema for the ear” that was on display last weekend at the San Francisco Tape Music Festival.