Meet the Artists - Miles Scharff
Photo: “the taking apart, the sawing in half”, 2024
About: Miles Scharff is a sound artist and musician who’s work lies in improvisation, spatial audio, and sound sculpture. His work seeks to create viscerality from ephemerality through presenting and exaggerating interactions between sound and material, treating sound as a physical object. This is ultimately an investigation of the properties of sound signals, both audible, non-audible, and of the inner ear, and how those properties can define listening, presence, and the invasion of privacy. Miles has used self-constructed wave field synthesis arrays for installations and experiences for The Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh, Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens, and the Rube Goldberg Foundation. He has exhibited sound sculptures at the Fridman Gallery and the Wallach Gallery in New York City. Miles received his bachelors in Physics and Music Technology from Carnegie Mellon University, and is currently an MFA candidate for Columbia’s Sound Art program.
How do you describe your practice?
My practice begins with the discovery of a physical or technological phenomena, and then experimentation and iteration on how to translate my experience of this phenomena through sound and sculpture. Recently, most of the phenomena have had to do with the electromagnetic spectrum and telecommunications, like how radio waves interact with each other inside of metal bridges and how this interaction can be perceived through sound. I’m interested in what happens when this electromagnetic ecology is witnessed, and what being aware of electromagnetic phenomena does to a population’s sense of privacy.
What are your influences, what inspires you?
I’m deeply influenced by improvisational music, and very much try to instill its qualities of presence and intuitiveness in my own practice. I’m also influenced by personal encounters with electromagnetic phenomena. Right now I’m very influenced by the story of Lucille Ball hearing the radio inside of her head through her dental implant.
Where are you based and what is your background in terms of education?
I am based in NYC in the sound art MFA program at Columbia University. I did my undergrad in physics and music technology at Carnegie Mellon University.
What does engaging with nature mean to you as an artist?
Engaging in nature is a stretching of the temporal and the physical scale. In the same way I am interested in how we are unconsciously affected by electromagnetic interactions, I’m curious how man-made electromagnetic activity could be unknowingly be interfering with nature. Whether or not this is true, the mode of thinking in both cases is how to get people to become aware of something that isn’t immediately perceivable, which is very relevant when dealing with climate change.
What does it mean to be selected for the summer school?
This program has put me in an incredibly unique position of being connected with forest researchers and artists from around the world to think about what kind of artistic intervention could be placed in a forest, and how that intervention can function. I’m not exactly sure what that means yet, but I know I’m going to learn so much and I’m excited to see what happens.