Abstract:

The story of Narcissus and Echo in Ovid's "Metamorphoses", recalls the transformation of two characters, Echo, a nymph who cannot find his love, and Narcissus who falls in love with his own image. The story revolves around the theme of loneliness in which Echo represents the sound and Narcissus represents the image. Hereby, Narcissus represents the source image and the image reflected on a surface, while Echo can be defined as an alienated and lonely voice that has moved away from its source, abandoned its body. With the advent of sound recording technology in the twentieth century, sound and the source began to be separated from each other. The fact that the sounds and the objects that make the sound were able to be played without the physical presence of the object and the manipulation allowed the artists to establish new relationships between the sounds and images that are independent of each other. Thus, the idea of separation of the sound and image, starting from the 1960s in the Western art environment created a production medium which is called the Sound Art. This study aims to provide a perspective on how the theme of loneliness is examined in certain contemporary sound art works in accordance with the source image and transformed sounds based on Narcissus and Echo myth.