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.
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.
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?
