Work in Progress at Soundfjord

On the 2nd-4th of December 2011 Wajid Yaseen and I held a Work in Progress session at the Soundfjord Gallery in London, http://www.soundfjord.org/galleryexhibitions.htm , where the public were invited to take part in the process of thinking through ideas for the sound work we were proposing to develop.  Helen Frosi, the curator of the gallery, was enthusiastic about the idea and keen to bring in the public and demystify the process in making sound art work. Wajid and I wanted to bring our combined different experience to the process, and have a dedicated 3 days to have the freedom to explore ideas.
We were both interested in the idea of sound travelling through different materials. During the event we played different sounds, with a recorded sound source, into different materials where every object, structure or body could be a potential amplifier.

Here are people listening to recorded vocal sounds played into their bodies using tissue and bone as the resonating and amplifying material.

Visitors to the event came through out the weekend, up to 30 including a group of 10 from Enfield Mencap Centre, a few who stayed for a whole day, some who returned on the following day, and those with ages ranging from 1 and a half years old to 70 years old.

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Wajid brought a recording of his composition for a string quartet and we played the sound into the wood of the chairs, using the resonating qualities of the wood to amplify the sound rather than ordinary speakers.

 

Here is a transducer battery powered kit in the making. It consists of an amp,(40W Kemo –MO34N) a transducer (Low frequency surface transducer – CEPT170A087-125-20MR), a 9v battery and an MP3 player.

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Playing a sine tone through a rusty tin (Sylvia Halletts’ favourite) and polystyrene –(Max Eastleys’ favourite)

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Notes from our Ideas Wall

 

We questioned the compositional and interactive elements of the ideas. I deliberately wanted the element of composition to come into the discussions, as aspects of my practise have led me away from composing music and sound. I had brought hand held equipment designed to allow the individual to investigate what amplified the sound from the transducer. I was keen to discuss the reasoning that one could have for the choice or choices of recordings.

 
 

 
Do you associate this image with a doctors’ waiting room, or perhaps the prim line up of adjudicating judges seats?

What were the associations with the different settings of the chairs? Memory and association were part of our conversations, as was imagination.  The two original ideas we brought along (sound through chairs and sound through the body) we found were linked in a lot of ways, but the contrast between them brought up different and useful viewpoints to wrangle with. There was an element of anthropomorphising the chairs, where the absent musical players were associated with and sometimes seem even to be represented by the chairs.
Disembodiment seemed to be an element present in both of the original ideas.

 

 

Listening to an external heart sound through the body

 

 

The playing of body sounds into a body was reported as a strange and for some a repelling experience. The radiating internally of an internal sound that did not belong to the listener and was alien, gave rise to loud exclamations. The focus on bodily sounds connected with the notion of the transducers being like stethoscopes or medical objects, almost seemed to suggest the chair was human or the chair had some link with the person that had sat on it.

 

 
The speaking voice listed speeds of sound through different materials. We played this sound though different materials.

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Here people are using the efficient ‘conducting elbow’. The battery-powered kit meant that people could try playing sound through different objects and themselves round and outside the space.

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People made images, models and wrote thoughts on our wall of ideas.
The process brought up a number of things:

•    The randomly timed entrance of visitors certainly added to the richness of the conversations and variety of different ideas. Experiments were acted upon in the moment, and ideas were kicked off though the fluid movement of people with their imaginations sparking off others and the physical energy of interactivity.

•    The re cycling of ideas came about naturally when new people came in and by telling them what we were doing or had been thinking about, our rephrasing for different people instigated new thoughts and ideas. We were taking a step back to recap, but often it took the ideas forward in another direction.

•    After the event we reflected the difference between the intuitive ideas and thrashed out ideas – and talked about what could be gained or even lost, by going into detail.

We saw that our two original ideas that were contrasting (sound through chairs and sound through the body) although seemingly opposing ideas cross-fertilised and created new questions, and amongst them the nature of the forms composition and installation and we wondered what would a hybrid piece be like : perhaps a quartet comprised of sounds from ‘four bodies’ perhaps.

Come and see what the next step is at Audiograft 2012.  29th feb – 4th March www.audiograft.com
And further developments at BEAM Workshop Day 10th March 2012
www.beamestival.com/beam-festival-2012/

 

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No babies or toddlers were used to test sound frequency in our event but everything has its own resonant frequency.

 

 

Sound – artists’ impression – (aged 11 months)  – or was it a scribble?

Summer Trip 2011 – Part 3

Approaching our last destination late at night, we saw what looked like a fire burning on the sea as we flew into Koto Kinabalu, capital of Sabah (A Malaysian part of the island of Borneo). It was an off shore oilrig, and a sight that set the table of mysteries and atmosphere for the unknown we were to encounter. I didn’t take a picture of the oilrig from the plane at that moment, as the plane was bouncing around violently, although I wish I had had the presence of mind to record the exuberant and terrified screams that ensued.

Mt. Kinabalu is known as the Mountain of Spirits and is a majestic presence in the area. The sounds of KK and Sabah were calm and more natural than the urban sounds of Seoul and Hong Kong, being out of a city and on the coast. We explored the secondary forest and coastline, looking into the bays that lead to the mangrove swamps.

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The swamps are mostly mangrove trees and a few islands. The people have evolved different houses for the places they live, houses on stilts here in the swamps, boat houses on the sea shore, long houses in the primary forest and so on. They live in the nature and with the wildlife that lives there too.

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We made our way in a small boat through the mangrove, and came after a while to a burial site where the family bring the deceased in a boat to this island. Instead of head stones or plaques, type of person: young, old etc is commemorated by different coloured cloth.

Traditional instruments – gong or talempong, drums – tambor and gendang, and 9 note metallephone like a simple version of the Indonesian gamelan instruments. The recording was done in a rather reverberant hotel foyer, and with out the rest of the band.

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Exploring the secondary forest and courted by the cicadas, squirrels and snakes. Luckily our guide alerted us to this Spitting Cobra, a dangerous snake, obviously put out by our tramping through his territory. A member of our party had a noisy camera, and I wondered what this creature thought of these digital beeps.

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We flew home over miles of unknown terrain, back thought the night and day, altering watches, changing daily diets to a chilly UK. Even though I am now many thousands of miles away, and months down the line from my visit, the recorded moments in sound fill my head with my travel experiences: the substance of the ground under my feet, the physical spaces around me at the time, the sun on my back and even the exotic smells.

Summer Trip 2011- Part 2

Hong Kong is a place of stunning water and islands, where the old and new coexist. The skyscrapers, a veritable crowd of high-rise giants lean together with their toes at the waters edge. Sounds ricochet out between them, like an amplifier, especially when the fireworks show is happening. Here are snap shots and sound bites from the second part of our three-part trip to Asia.

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I was interested to find an interview with Yang Yeung, a Sound Artist, resident of Hong Kong and director ‘Sound Pocket’, describing the way sounds are perceived from high up the buildings, ‘I remember going up to a 20-storey factory building with some friends in Aberdeen, south of Hong Kong Island. It used to be a fishing village and now a vantage point for getting boats to outlying islands. We stood on the rooftop one sunset and the birds were playing around. The traffic noise from below was audible, but not disturbing. It’s like it is suspended on the 18th floor or something, forming a “cloud,” hanging.’

http://www.examiner.com/experimental-arts-in-national/susie-law-wai-shan-yang-yeung-soundpocket-and-hong-kong-s-soundscapes

30 stories up, the ground seemed like another world away, and quite quiet. The sky seems to move and the buildings actually do sway about especially in a high wind and especially typhoons that are quite common. My brother, who lives with his family in Hong Kong, described the improvements done to the design of the foundations of the high buildings so that the surplus rain does not damage their stability. Even now, during the typhoon storms , the movement from the tower blocks’ is quite dramatic, especially the higher up you are. To warn you of an impending typhoon, and especially the boats in the harbour, a signal is sent out. Historically it would have been a gun or explosive so ships would and still do take cover by the shore, although now it is broadcast over TV and radio.

Commenting on sounds representing Hong Kong nowadays, Yang Yeung says in an interview with Pandie Ho ‘I wouldn’t say it is representative, but the “doot” of Octopus cards dominates the everyday soundscape. But I miss the sounds of the coins going through the slots on public vehicles.

http://hk.asia-city.com/events/article/upclose-yeung-yang

I didn’t get a recording of the Octopus cards, (equivalent of our Oyster card) but did get the omnipresent pedestrian crossing beeps.

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In a side street – Qingming or Ancestors day – observed here by office workers in their lunch hour by burning money to be carried in the smoke, up to their ancestors.

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Still working daily down on the water, the Star Ferry takes passengers from the main land Kowloon, to Hong Kong Island for a mere couple of Hong Kong dollars. The Star Ferry Company, dating back to 1888, still has its 1933 diesel electric engines. The top deck is still the first class and the bottom second class, and climbing on especially the lower deck you hear the lovely diesel engine and smell of oily fumes, and the vibration goes through your bones.

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Summer Trip 2011 – Part 1

Asia was noisy and busy and amazing! Here are the sounds from the first part of our three-part journey this summer. Listening again to my collection of sound snapshots of the places has reminded me how even a short sound bite can put you spatially, geographically and sensationally right back to where you first heard it. We touched down first in Incheon International Airport -South Korea. We took the metro from the airport to the city.

With the archaic landscape outside, the inside was a contrastingly ultra modern experience with air conditioned sped along with alternating western style trumpet fanfares and traditional music motifs as the doors opened. Voices announced directions in multiple languages while screens kept you amused – if at the time you weren’t taking advantage of the all-available Internet!

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In the city there are stark contrasts with old and new culture. Young people form all over Asian look to Seoul for their contemporary culture. These two BBoys (pictured) were telling me how the Koreans are leading the International field in dance where BBoying is concerned.

Above ground in the centre of the city at Gyeongbokgung Palace, is evidence of an older culture, and the traffic sound coexisted strangely with the conch shell bugles and shell rattles of the changing of the guard. (And my recorder battery ran out at this point!)

Away from the centre however, the extraordinarily loud noise of the cicadas could be heard in the city streets.

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Here’s the street where we heard, the equivalent of the rag and bone man drive up and down in the rain in his battered truck calling on his mega phone for unwanted electrical goods.

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The presence of the rain (there was unusual city wide flooding as we visited Seoul), the heat and the solid rock of the mountains gave me a feeling for the ‘elemental substance’ of the place. At the Asian Art Museum, the beautifully restored house of a highly renowned teacher of the ideas of Confucius, we were shown and played the traditional instruments, gongs, cymbals and drums, that represented the elements: thunder, lightning, dancing, rain, sun and wind.

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At the other side of town by the port were the familiar thrills and spills of the fairground.

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Koreans felt to me to have toughness in their genes judging by their history, ability to survive, their fitness and their inventiveness. It’s a popular national pastime to walk in the National Parks, so we joined in, took the metro and explored the nearest of the parks, Bukhansan National Park, climbing 739 metres to a peak over looking the city.

On the way down, with light fading, we came across a temple built over a spring and heard as we descended the temple bell through the trees

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Back in the summer I went to visit a friend who kindly said she would come and experience the sound from the ground, from a mic in the ground playing through a sub woofer in my car, and let me write down what she thought about it. Gemma’s experience was going to be different from mine as she is profoundly deaf.

 

We put a geophone (microphone) 30 meters from the car into the grass in the park and sat in the car and watched the people go by. We felt the vibrations of their feet, and the vibrations of the traffic from the road being picked up by the mic and playing through the subwoofer (speaker).

There was road works about 150m away so after a while we went on to another park away from the main road, and that was quite busy with people walking, children playing, bird song and dogs barking. I attempted to record Gemma’s reactions to the subwoofer’s vibrations, and ask questions that would help me imagine what is was like to experience the world without sound, but visually and through the experience of vibration.

Shirley. In the ground there is sound \vibration from the city: a low din going on. So even without drills and traffic, there’s quite a lot of noise. What is your reaction to this sound?

Gemma. It’s surprising what noise is there to be amplified – but it’s not obvious here.

S. Have you heard/felt vibrations like these (from the sub) before?

G. Yes.

S. Do you know where the sounds/vibrations are coming from?

G. If I see visually then yes – other wise no.

S. Do you notice, or are you ever aware of vibrations when you don’t know where they are coming from, and is that usual?

G Yes – If  I’m around hearing people, I ask what that noise is!! Usually I have to describe what I’m feeling to match what it sounds like.

S. When some one asks me to ‘listen!’ I am aware of lots of sounds I don’t usually tune into. Is this the case with vibration?

G Yes. But only if it’s loud enough for me to feel!!

S. Is there a whole series or gradation of vibration you can identify?

G  There are some vibrations I do recognise if I don’t see it – e.g. a ball bouncing on the floor and something being dropped or a glass smashing on the floor.

S. Is it  (the vibration from the subwoofer) different if I close the car door?

G.  A bit.

S. When the drill isn’t drilling, can you feel the traffic rumble from the road?

G. Yes a bit –

S. How do you feel the vibrations? For example – in your bones or through your skin?

G. In my diaphragm and through my feet.

S. Wow – How did you come to realise this was happening? When you were younger did you remember becoming conscious of it?

G Well, I never really had any hearing after the age of 12, so from the age of 12 I became more conscious of vibrations and since then I’ve made lots of effort to learn and recognise more vibrations.

S. Are you influenced by different vibrations?

G. Irregular vibrations are irritating – man made – gets annoying. Regular rhythms are better nicer.

S. Do you think other deaf and partially hearing people you know feel the some as you?

G Well, I know my family is the same as me, and some deaf people too. I think most deaf people and partially hearing people have some sort of hearing therefore they are more oblivious to vibrations.

S. Do you ever talk about the quality of the ‘vibes’ to other deaf and partially hearing friends?

G Yes – If I’ve seen a band or at a gig that I really enjoyed the vibes from, I try to spread the word!!

S. Do you have a preference to big or small vibrations? Will you get as close as you can to a speaker at a festival – for the excessive experience – or is it uncomfortable – or are you happy to just have a small amount of the vibe?

G Well.. That depends!! Most of the time I do try to be right next to the speaker, but there has been a few places where it’s really overwhelmingly LOUD and it does get too much for me!

S. Do you know musicians or DJs who are deaf?

G Yes! There are a few – Mostly in London.

 

S. Have you ever come across the percussionist Evelyn Glennie? Yes

As a deaf percussionist, she is very interested in the way we ‘listen’ through our bodies. She became deaf at 8 years old, can hear a bit and lip reads well.   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLvkoAZYAkI

http://culture.uoregon.edu/event/1443

She describes hearing as a form of touch. Would you say touch is a form of hearing?

G Yes, Everything speaks volumes through touch and vibrations. E.g. Visually a guitar does not make any sound to me but when I touch it while it’s playing – it’s amazing!! So many vibrations and rhythms etc…

 

S. Do you go dancing and dance to the vibration of the beat in the music?

G. Yes- like a lot.

S. What are the best beats to dance to?

G. House, reggae, pop – Not complicated Latin rhythms though.

S. Is there anything you can add about the experience of vibration and how it is helpful or pleasurable?

G. Makes me feel heavy.  Sometimes I go through a whole host of vibrations every day, and when it gets too much I do want some peace and quiet!! Bit like you having a particularly loud day?? I can feel the bumpy road but the smooth road is quiet.

S. Can you hear or sense that bird? (Black bird singing very loudly close by).

G. No not at all.

S. Do you match up the visuals you are seeing and the vibration you are feeling?

G. Yes it happens all the time. It’s important and alerts me to danger.

S. I wonder how this differs from a hearing person? We all use our hearing to alert us to danger – from crossing the road listening for traffic, to keeping safe from dangerous people like muggers and burglars!! How much do partially and profoundly deaf people depend on vibration for personal safety?

G We don’t – We rely on our eyes for alerts to danger. Vibrations are difficult to judge for danger.

S. Do you feel your own hart beating/vibrating?

G. Yes but I’m used to it. It is alarming when it’s racing and I’m out of breath.

S. What other vibrations alarm you?

G I can’t think of anything – one might be someone running towards me as it gets louder with each step and when I recognise the vibration I do look around to make sure I’m safe.

S. Are there any other internal vibrations from your body that you are aware of? My bones click sometimes. Can you feel that? When you have a thumping head ache, are you sensitive to small vibrations?

Yes! And Yes… I like to stay in bed when I’m hung-over or ill,  as I know it’s very very quiet there!!!

S. Can you feel high sounds at all, and if so what are they?

Not really – Maybe a glass smashing as I know that’s high, but not much.

 

S. There’s a sound artist\musician, Kaffe Mathews, who has made a sound piece that’s bed you lay on that vibrates – sounds saucy!  People lie on it and hear the sounds but also become aware of the vibrations. Ooh!! I wanna try that!!

http://www.musicforbodies.net/wiki/SonicBedMarfa

‘Ever felt music through your back? Or slide up and down your legs as it spins round your arms to your fingertips? A Sonic Bed will let you do just that .’ kaffemathews.net

 

G. I am enjoying thinking where I feel vibration. No one talks about this usually.

S. What else would you like to explore or point out in regard to vibration?

G Personally, there’s so much more music I’ve not listened/felt yet, and it’s limiting when I need a bass box! It’d be amazing if someone invented speaker gloves that I can attach to an I-Pod and listen to music when I’m out and about!!!

I haven’t been dancing for ages. It’s a great freedom.

 

S. Can you hear of feel your dog Willow?

G. I can’t feel my dog bark, but I can closer up- about a meter away I can.  Growling- only if I am touching him can I feel that. I mostly use visual body language to understand my dog – and the others I look after.

G. It would be good if you, and the car subwoofer system, came to the festival with us (deaf group of friends) and we could dance to the bands without having to go up front right next to the speakers – and I could have my dog with me.

 

S. When we came to the quieter park, I remember you described the small vibration being like the ‘wind’ or the ‘rain’. Inuit have hundreds of words for snow. Have you any other descriptive words for vibrations?  Maybe describing strong vibrations…

G.  Yes – we describe it easily through sign language and make the vibration visual to help describe it to other deaf and partially hearing people. It’s hard todescribe it in English!!

S. Well thank you- for this fascinating insite into the world of vibration! I am now thinking of more and different questions as I begin to put myself in your place.

 

G. Thanks to Shirley for an amazing experience of amplified everyday sounds! It helps me to understand more about hearing people and what they listen to and experience the differences in sounds!!

You would have seen it at:

Audiograft (audiograft.com) Oxford 16-20/2/2011

The Festival of Desperation (desperatemen.com) Bristol 16-20 /10/2010.

People came in the day and the dark and sampled the live subterranean sound.

Ground Sound is an out side sound installation, where listeners can sit inside a car and hear the live sounds of the ground on the car’s sound system. A geophone, planted in the ground, plays through a sub woofer in the boot of the car relaying the low frequencies of the city sound and traffic giving the listeners a different take on the terrain below their feet.

My initial thoughts linked low frequency sound of the car culture – sub woofers playing hip hop beats – with the low frequency and vibration I had been finding with under ground sound. So I made a car sound system that played live ground sounds to see what would happen.

The sound in the car (Ground Sound) provoked dire opposing reactions turning out to be a place of associations and evoking strong physical memories:

Spooky – Scary

Made me feel ill

Lovely low pitch

Sinister and strangely relaxing at the same time

Intense – don’t really know what’s going on

Brilliant – Noisy isn’t it

Love that sound

Very comforting

Ominous and spooky

Not quite comfortable

Kinda novel – Weird

Don’t know what it is but I like it

People had associations from past experiences of sitting in a car, ferry boat or

Watching a film:

Like boat engines in the dock or the rumble of something coming over the hill

Like under water – but nice- all dull muted and a bit fuzzy

Like being a child again – car trip with your parents – being on the back seat

Like you are traveling but you’re not – you notice everybody

Allows you to go away in your head

Like it – bringing the outside in

In this bubble- feels like you’re on a stake out

Feel like I am watching a film playing out

It paces time differently

I can see the ground as if it had surface tension and on top of which we – the pedestrians and the traffic skated like water boatmen –lightly sounding the meniscus or skin on the top of the pond. ( Words form journal 2010)

Surface tension: In Bristol by College Green the sound and vision of the walkers as well as the traffic, and the manifestation of their footsteps hear from under the flag stones, made me imagine them as flies on a pond surface playing on the surface like light fingers on a drum. So that begged the question- What, below this surface, is going on?

The experience provoked thoughts about what happens under your feet that we don’t usually think about:

The ground is like a vibrating surface – when you tap your foot

Is there just a massive sound that is inaudible to us beneath our feet?

Was it the trees and the roots (making the sound)?

Opens up the earth beneath your feet

Thought I heard the worms

Projection: Sound vibration has no boundaries. It goes right through the earth and permeates under oceans and cities at low frequencies we cannot hear but feel.(natural hum of the earth 1Hz and below and 1-7Hz cultural and natural noise (see journals). When we listen to the radio we imagine where the sound has come from. And like listening to the radio, the ephemeral qualities of hearing sound allows the listener to be both intimately close up in detail to all its’ qualities, and project our thought or imagination to its’ source, and the course of its’ travel to our ears.

Some people thought of themselves in relation to the planet:

With people clomping and the cars you feel the weight of the things on the earth

We leave a heavy footprint even though we don’t mean to

Like I’m underground- having something over the top of me

I will walk more softly from now on

It makes me feel bigger – makes me feel vast

Meaning and reality: The distortion of sound traveling through the ground,(faster than in air) where you don’t see exactly what you are used to seeing with the sound you hear, gets us to re-examine our presumptions about our reality that we take for granted. Perhaps this process, a mismatch of eye an ear, ‘takes apart the mechanism of meaning’ (feed back).

You hear people before you see them

Interesting relationships with what you’re seeing and what you don’t hear

Looking for connections with what I could see and what I was listening to..

The sound experienced as vibration takes apart the mechanisms of listening to it’s elemental components and reminds us of it’s process – when shaking our bodies’ bones as well as those in our eardrums.

Earlier this year I went to Redcliffe Caves: a labyrinth of tunnels under the city by the Bristol Docks, and Charlotte Heffernan and I put geophones in the walls of the underground caves to listen to the sound that could be heard. We couldn’t hear very much: mostly very faint traffic sounds and electrical buzzes. We did hear muffled signs of life above our heads. We were directly under streets and houses and a pub. When we drove away we noticed people in the pub drinking. We thought of the direction of the tunnels and realised that they had made those faint sounds – the ones we heard underground. They reminded me of the muffled sounds you hear through walls and doors and even from under the bath water when you are a child.

‘The faint underground sounds seemed somehow amplified and more potent in their remoteness deep down in the quiet underground.’ Words from journal  2010

I made an installation for the sound festival Audiograft (http://www.audiograft.com/ ) after thinking about these small sounds heard remotely through the big chunk of rock and clay.  Through Walls was a sound piece where people inside a room could hear sounds through the walls and outside sounds through the large plate glass window.

 

Outside the room speakers played sound directly into the walls. They played a track of random domestic sound I had picked up in my house into the wall. These sounds were hardly audible in the room but heard if you put your ear or a listening device to locate them on the wall. Listeners experimented by pressing their ears on the walls or used listening devices: tumblers, funnels, horns, stethoscopes etc. The walls and plate glass surfaces acted both as amplifiers and filters to the sound heard through them.

 

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People fed back their thoughts. The instruments became ‘extensions’ to their own ears. The act of creating new ‘big ears’ started people thinking:  What sounds are we listening to? Where is it coming from? The instruments transformed the sound we could hear with our ears. It was commented that it showed how extremely efficient our own ears seem, inferring that we are not even aware of the transforming qualities our own ears have.

Sound brought clear associations of the past. The listeners’ had memories of sounds heard in the past through materials such as walls, water and glass. We have, it seems, been receiving our sound from our earliest memories from all the different materials around us.

The Pipe

My idea was to show a large-scale resonator (pipe) that would describe how long the LIVE sound

wave   actually was, and we would hear and experience the vibrations of the sound wave as it

resonated  in the pipe.  I was aiming to play a 16 meter long sound wave!

I set up a geophone that played live sound from the ground into a speaker at the end of a pipe.

A 4 m  sewage down pipe was the largest I could get my hands on at this time. The geophone

was  picking upthe sound of the traffic 80 m away, across Headington House Gardens at

Oxford Brookes  University.

I found out that sealing the end of a pipe would create a lower frequency, in fact a quarter of the length of a sound wave in a sealed pipe.  So our 4m sealed pipe resonated the same as the whole 16m length of sound wave in an open or un sealed pipe, amongst other frequencies. Ours was not an exact science as far as the sealing up of the pipe went. (With an outside setting there were not exact workings regarding end correction etc.)  I had some helpful advice from musician and electroacoustician, Sarah Angliss and artist and technologist Mike Blow, who played a sine wave into a carefully sealed pipe and had the maths to prove it.

http://www.sarahangliss.com/

http://mikeblow.wordpress.com/

Open 16m pipe at  21Hz (Just audible)

4m long sound wave resonates best in an open 4m pipe at 85Hz (You can hear this)

A 4m sealed pipe resonates ¼ of a 16m sound wave at 21Hz  (Just audible again)

http://www.sengpielaudio.com/calculator-wavelength.htm

So what were we listening to? Here’s some of the sound and vibration if you have good bass speakers or a sub.

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Revealing-   Showing -   Illustrating -   Demonstrating -   Informing -   Illuminating -   Amplifying

So, did it work? It played sound, and different frequencies were resonated. It didn’t work in the way I had imagined, because these details, in my head, were not obvious to the observing audience. The feedback was varied: it had encouraged some people to think to of the space under their feet, to imagine a massive inaudible sound in the earth, to question the trickery of the equipment, think of the ‘ground as a vibrating surface’, and importantly question the need to standardize the equipment in order to understand what I was listening to.

It posed the question: When is an event a demonstration of science, and when is it art?  Is there a difference and does it matter? Sound artist Alvin Lucier, in an interview with Chris Buck in the Wire (issue 245 2004) states, ‘Scientists often miss the poetic beauty of nature and the sensual experience of natural forces…. I understand the (scientific) principals more because I’ve used them in a piece experientially rather than theoretically’. With that in mind it’s definitely worth checking out these works:

Katie Patterson – Moonhttp://www.wired.co.uk/wired-magazine/archive/2010/05/play/katie-paterson-the-universe-s-official-artist?page=all

Mark Bain – Live Room:Transducing Resonant Architecture

http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9908/msg00023.html

Bill Fontana – Speeds of Time

http://www.resoundings.org/Pages/Speeds_of_Time_new.html

Roberta Gigante  OrgOOn in  Ghent Docks

http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2010/05/organoon-at-electrified.php

I was sorry to miss this festival in Ghent last year, where Roberta Gigante was playing sound into 30m long pipes. Open at one end they would be resonating at a frequency of 11.43 Hz.   Given the pipes could be sealed frequency would be =3.81Hz and the sound wave 90m long. That is some length of sound wave!

If anyone knows the whereabouts of some monster sized pipes in the UK, then let me know as I ‘d be delighted to use them for some sound experiments.

Roberta Gigante  OrgOOn          photo: Reinout Hiel for Vooruit