A sound is over almost as soon as it starts. A drawing stays. That gap is exactly what pulls so many artists toward sound drawings: images that try to hold on to something you can only hear.
The term covers a surprisingly wide range of work. Some sound drawings are records of listening, made while music plays. Others are instructions, meant to be read and performed.
A few are machines in disguise, marks that turn back into sound when light passes through them. Here is how that range developed, who shaped it, and how you can try it in your own practice.
Sand, plates and the first pictures of sound
One of the earliest sound drawings was not made by an artist at all. In 1787 the German physicist and musician Ernst Chladni published Entdeckungen über die Theorie des Klanges (Discoveries on the Theory of Sound) in Leipzig.
Chladni scattered sand on thin metal plates and drew a violin bow along the edge. As the plate vibrated, the sand gathered along the lines that stayed still, forming the symmetrical patterns now known as Chladni figures.
Nobody holds a pencil in this process, but the result is unmistakably a drawing: a pattern made by sound itself. Artists, designers and science teachers still repeat the experiment, and it remains a useful reminder that vibration has a shape.
Sound paintings and the shock of a concert
On 2 January 1911, Wassily Kandinsky went to a concert of Arnold Schoenberg's music in Munich with Franz Marc and other friends from the Neue Künstlervereinigung. Schoenberg had set aside the usual rules of harmony, and the group left the hall excited.
Within days Kandinsky was sketching the performance. The finished canvas, Impression III (Concert), now belongs to the Lenbachhaus in Munich. A black mass suggests a grand piano, and a wash of yellow floods the space around loosely drawn listeners.
The painting is not a literal picture of the evening. It is closer to an account of how the music felt. Kandinsky also began a long correspondence with Schoenberg, and the encounter fed directly into his move toward abstraction.
This is the root of most sound paintings and art inspired by sound: not illustration, but translation. The artist asks what a sound does to colour, line and space, and lets the answer change the picture.
Graphic scores: drawings you can play
In the twentieth century, composers turned the idea around. Instead of drawing what they had heard, they drew what should be heard next.
Earle Brown's December 1952 is a single page of black horizontal and vertical bars of different lengths and thicknesses, with no staff and no notes. The performers decide how to read it, and no two performances sound the same.
Cornelius Cardew went further with Treatise, written between 1963 and 1967. Its 193 pages of lines, circles, numbers and abstract shapes come without fixed instructions, so each group of musicians has to invent its own way of playing it.
Graphic scores matter to visual artists because they sit between two disciplines. They hang on gallery walls, yet they only fully exist when someone performs them. For anyone working in sound art as artistic research, they are a good model of a drawing that is also a method.
Drawing directly on sound
Some artists took the idea literally and drew the sound itself. Film soundtracks were once stored optically, as patterns of light and dark along the edge of the film strip, and those patterns could be painted or photographed by hand.
The Scottish-Canadian animator Norman McLaren made whole soundtracks this way at the National Film Board of Canada. For Synchromy (1971) he shot striped cards onto the soundtrack area, then copied the same patterns into the picture, so that what you see on screen is what you hear.
In Britain, Daphne Oram developed the Oramics Machine through the 1960s. It used light sensors to read hand-drawn marks on glass slides and strips of 35mm film, turning them into pitch, volume and tone colour. In effect, she composed by drawing.
Christine Sun Kim and the politics of sound
Some of the most widely seen sound drawings of recent years come from Christine Sun Kim, a Deaf artist born in California and based in Berlin. Her work uses charcoal, diagrams, musical notation and the structure of American Sign Language to ask who gets to own sound.
Her series Degrees of Deaf Rage (2018) is a set of large charcoal and oil pastel drawings built from hand-drawn angles. Each angle measures the frustration caused by situations such as long videos with no captions, or transit announcements given only in spoken English.
Christine Sun Kim's art often borrows the language of the musical score, including dynamic markings, and bends it to describe social experience rather than volume alone. In 2025 the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York gave her a survey exhibition, All Day All Night.
Her drawings are a useful corrective to the idea that sound drawing is only about hearing. They show that sound is also etiquette, access and power, and that a drawing can make those unspoken rules visible.
Waveforms, spectrograms and the sound wave artist
Digital audio gave artists new pictures to work with. Any recording can be displayed as a waveform, the familiar jagged line of loud and quiet, or as a spectrogram, which spreads frequencies across time like a heat map.
Many artists now work directly from these images, printing the waveform of a voice, a song or a place as an object in its own right. The appeal is easy to see: the image is precise, yet you cannot hear it without help.
Musicians have played with the same idea from the other side. Aphex Twin hid an image of a face in a track on the 1999 Windowlicker single, visible only when the audio is viewed as a spectrogram. It is a sound drawing that appears only to people who look at sound instead of listening to it.
How to start making sound drawings
You do not need special equipment to begin. A listening drawing only needs paper, a soft pencil or charcoal, and a sound source: a recording, a street corner, or a quiet room with a ventilation hum.
Start by drawing continuously for the length of one piece of music without looking at the paper. Then limit yourself to five kinds of mark and use only those to record a minute of street sound.
Next, make a score of a familiar place and ask a friend to perform it with their voice or a few objects. Finally, record a short sound, look at its waveform or spectrogram, and redraw it by hand at a much larger scale.
If you work with physical sound sources, the step from drawing to building can be short. Many artists who make sounding sculpture begin with drawn studies of how an object should ring, rattle or hum.
Keeping a record of the work
Sound drawings lose their context quickly. A month later, a sheet of marks means little unless you know what you were listening to, where, and for how long.
Note the date, place, sound source and duration on the back of each sheet, and keep a short recording alongside the drawing whenever you can. A simple system for documenting artistic research makes it far easier to show the process later, in an application, an exhibition text or a thesis.
That pairing of drawing and recording is also what makes the work interesting to others. It lets a viewer move between the two and notice what each one catches that the other misses.
About Dr. Mira Solheim
Dr. Mira Solheim is an art historian and writer focused on artistic research, Nordic visual culture and the intersection of art with technology and film. She writes for Artistic-Research.no on methodology, institutions and practice.