ARTISTS TALKING

# 1 [29 November 2007]

Monday 26th November

Today was spent exploring the campus. I am looking for areas of the college with interesting acoustics, either for future recordings or installations, or for a sound map. I will be drawing a plan of the site according to sound quality and relative location rather than physical buildings. Psycho-geography and psycho-acoustics in one... I have started making notes about noisy radiators, but the best discovery of the day is a white stairwell. All the surfaces are hard and reflective which produces the most fantastic resonance, especially from male voice frequencies. It layers and extends the sound so that conversations sound like Gregorian chants.

Wednesday 28th November

I have just finished giving two presentations to students about my work in relation to public performance. See www.myspace.com/babygrandbabygrand for some of my musical pieces, and www.flickr.com/photos/hollyrumble for two images of an installation I did using birds feeding to generate sound. My public work is about using objects to produce sound, and the relationship between the visual and the aural perception. I have found that it is important that the audience can see what I am doing, or are aware of the sources. I do enjoy making acousmatic works, but currently I have been considering the visual side of live performance: what is the audience going to be looking at when they hear the sounds? Should I go to one extreme and perform behind a curtain (or in the dark) like the Wizard of Oz, or should I display my objects like a physics experiment?

Thursday 29th November

I did a few binaural recordings at some of the locations I noted on Monday. I will be assembling a series of static location images with these field recordings, as a visual experiment to see whether the audio affects the ‘visual interest' of the photograph. There are some particularly tuneful doors in one corridor which I might play around with when the students have gone one night...

The afternoon was different, because I joined in with the previous artist in residence's etching workshop. So much fun! I can see why printing can be addictive. I drew some owls...

# 2 [30 November 2007]

Friday 30th November

I spent today editing the field recordings and performance recordings. I now have six pieces edited to one-minute tracks, which I will add to the still photographs next week. The space recreated by the binaural recordings is so accurate that I have to keep turning around to see if someone has come into the room. The loops recorded from the Wednesday performances are great; I'm really pleased with them as tracks, not just as documentation of a demonstration. The one the students (Dew and Nina) did is brilliant; clunky but really interesting. It is obvious that it is by someone else, despite the same objects being used, because the choice of rhythms and speed is something I don't usually explore. I am looking forward to a group improvisation in January to see what we all come up with. 

# 3 [3 December 2007]

Monday 3rd December

I have compiled my six static shots of spaces with their respective binaural recordings as a simple ‘slideshow'-style film. Each image remains on screen for 1 minute whilst the audio plays. I listened to it using headphones so that the stereo remained accurately spaced around my head. The whole effect was a lot more powerful than I could have imagined, because the audio presence of movement (such as passing speech or opening doors) actually tricked my brain into momentary illusions where I thought I saw the figure move through the static image. The images do not have any figures in; they are purely architectural. This is a fairly well-known effect, explained by Gestalt psychologists, in which the brain is trying to make sense of a number of stimuli to form a whole perception of an event. It is for this reason that I am so interested in the role of the visual in the work of a sound artist. The brain is always trying to form links between all stimuli it receives, so it is important that all perceptual elements of an artwork have been considered by the artist if the work is to communicate any consistent content to the viewer/listener. 

In this age where music has started to lose its visual context (the increasing use of downloaded mp3s, divorced from the packaging and explanations of printed material; the commonplace laptop performances with little guide for the audience as to how the sounds are produced, or indeed whether they are ‘live') I wonder how sound art can exist in the physical world without shifting entirely into download territory. One important way is perhaps to reconsider the Gestalt: how will the audience perceive the work from a combination of sensory stimuli?

# 4 [6 December 2007]

Thursday 6th December

This morning I took full advantage of the rain: I attached a contact mic to the old metal lamp I found in the photography studio and put it outside to collect the sound of the raindrops. It did resonate a bit anyway, so you could hear the raindrops without amplification, but the recording has picked up some particularly high, crisp, almost electrical elements. Like the birdseed piece I did, it is a very percussive sound which I wouldn't normally choose to create when ‘playing' an object. I like the simple illustration of chaos theory in generating sound; setting up the structure and leaving the content to chance. 

I have borrowed a signal generator from the physics department. It emits a sine tone which I can vary. When the students have left this afternoon I will take it down to the white stairwell to see if I can determine the resonant frequency of the space. If so, I might make an installation using that frequency and its harmonics, so that the architecture is directly influencing the sound content and behaviour. Site-specific art for purists... I've tested it out in the studio, using a rudimentary oscilloscope (the record volume bar on my minidisc recorder!), and the studio appears to have a resonant frequency of 400Hz. I expect the stairwell to be much lower because you can hear male voices better than female ones.

# 5 [6 December 2007]

Thursday 6th December

I've just got back from my little resonance experiment. As I suspected the stairwell supports a lot of harmonics, and with my basic equipment I didn't get the root frequency as such. I did however note down 12 frequencies up to 400Hz which were particularly resonant, so I will play around with those until I have a more accurate analyser to hand. Interestingly, three of the 12 tones are in G, and three others are very close to G (less than 6Hz). I will work on an installation which uses these tones, and experiment with placement to explore the reflections in the space.

# 6 [9 January 2008]

Wednesday 9^th January

This morning was the first workshop session with 10 students. The first hour or so I taught them how to make their own contact mic. It was relatively straightforward because it was a simple piece of electronics, but a couple of them had never soldered before, which took a little longer. Thankfully all the microphones worked at the end, so we spent the second half of the session playing around with the mics and deciding what groups they will be performing in, in two weeks’ time. I am doing a group improvised piece where six groups perform consecutively. I will be sampling elements of each performance to leave a running sound in the background. I have divided the students into three groups of sound-based music, and three of note-based music. They will have the morning of the performance to rehearse, but it’s going to be hilarious trying to organise 30 students at once, each with a different instrument…

# 7 [11 January 2008]

THIS IS A POST WHICH WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN DECEMBER BUT APPEARS TO HAVE BEEN LOST IN THE CHANGE-OVER.

Friday 7^th December

I spent most of today helping the students to put up an exhibition, discussing presentation issues and how to turn an object into an installation.

I then recorded some lovely sine tones with a view to composing them next week…

Tuesday 11^th December

I have been arranging the sine tones into a longer-playing piece today. Each tone is 30seconds long, but I am not sure how best to present them. I have done one version where a number of the tones play simultaneously, with each note only playing once in the track. It has a musical quality to it because the layers are producing familiar chords.

However, I am wondering whether the piece should be less fanciful and more scientific, given that the purpose of the piece is exploring the interaction of pure sound waves in the space, not in the arrangement. The ideal installation would be 12 speakers playing single tones, all arranged throughout the stairwell. However, the portable speakers I am currently using are having difficulty playing the lower frequencies, and only really kick in at around 132Hz. Given that I can only play the higher range of my notes then, I might edit the number of tones used for the piece, and perhaps have two stereo pairs of speakers. This would allow four different tones to play simultaneously, and I can choose the range to suit the speakers, and place the speakers a certain distance apart.

Hopefully I will be able to finish this part on Thursday or Friday, because after that the college shuts for Christmas. Next term I complete my residency, but I will be working on a large scale performance with thirty students, so there will be less time for amateur physics.

Thursday 13^th December

I made a 2-minute piece which consists of four sets of left and right sine tones, so it means eight tones can play without interference within the track. I took it up to the stairwell to listen to the tones back in the location. The whole piece sounded very pure, as if it was some distant machine whirring, and some people passed on the lower steps and didn’t really notice anything. I like the fact that you only know it’s happening if you stay in the stairwell for long enough to hear a marked change in the tones. As I walked back through the building afterwards I could hear all kinds of tones from computer rooms and cleaners and air-conditioning.

# 8 [11 January 2008]

Thursday 10^th January

Second workshop went well (but started late). The students really took to the process and whilst some were soldering the others were testing their mics on objects and surfaces (and hair). It’s great to get an enthusiastic group which understands why this kind of art exists, and it will make the performance much more valuable for them if it feeds back into their practice.

Friday 11^th January

The final workshop also went very well. Between us we have made 33 contact mics in the last three days. All the students have been divided into performance groups and are now (hopefully) off collecting the various objects they will use. My only stipulation has been that they don’t bring any traditional instruments to the performance. This part of the workshop has been very rewarding; every student now has a hand-made mic, and a few of them have specifically said that they can see how they might use them for their final projects. I think it is important that students at this stage are aware of contemporary practice, particularly the less traditional strands like sound or performance art. They don’t have to make this kind of work, but it helps them contextualise their own ideas, and provides the background knowledge that there is more out there than meets the eye (as it were).

# 9 [16 January 2008]

Wednesday 16^th January

Today I built an amplifier circuit from a kit. It’s very exciting because I’ve not done any circuit board work since school (probably 12 years then), and this one even has a chip in it! It took a while to decipher the capacitors, but other than that it worked first time. I used a small drinking glass to amplify the sound from the speaker, using the speaker like a removable lid. The act of lifting the speaker away created a kind of filter effect, which was quite interesting. I saw another artist at the Sonic Arts Network Expo in 2007 who had placed speakers inside glass vessels, and by lifting the lid you could release the sound (which is kind of the opposite to what I’ve just done). It’s like any kind of visual art where you must look through a keyhole or into a box: a nod to the child-like impulses of the contemporary gallery-goer.

The reason I am working on this is that I want eventually to be able to make sculptures with contact mics and speakers as an integral part. So far I have only ever used consumer items because that’s all I could use, so it’s been hugely important to me to learn how to do this. It means I can make smaller, self-contained objects that run off one 9V battery, and which have no trailing cables (which I hate: not for aesthetic reasons, but because somehow I always seem to tangle them up). I also think it’s important for me to be able to understand exactly what is happening from the sound source to the speaker. This is not to say I am favouring material exploration over conceptual content; I just feel more confident when I know what I am capable of making for any given brief. This residency is a good opportunity to do that.

# 10 [17 January 2008]

Thursday 17^th January

Today I decided to make a housing for the speaker and amplifier I made yesterday. I wanted to play around with the aesthetics, and make something out of bits of old wood I found in the studio. I like the idea that what I make does the same job (more or less loudly!) as my mini Marshal amp, but looks completely odd. An unbranded, unrecognisable means of broadcasting sound. In the end I came up with a flat panel 21x15cm, and 3cm deep (like a book). It has a small hole on the top surface for the LED and another above the speaker. When I played a recording through it I discovered that I could place different-sized, up-ended tins and glasses over the hole to subtly filter different frequencies. The action was a little like moving a glass over a Ouija board in a Victorian séance. A far cry from my chubby little Marshall…