Sound sculpture installation @ Gallery 46, Whitechapel, London (9th-12th February 2023)
This is an interactive work that repurposes a 1950s Bell Manufacturing Company telephone to engage with the perceptive process of change.
The work aims to cultivate a self-reflexive mode of attention, by displacing sound in time and subjecting it to a recursive disintegration that foregrounds the listener’s experience of and relationship to the dissolution of sounds that have recently passed through echoic memory.
By codifying the experience of impermanence into a subjective event, the possibility for a non-conceptual metacognitive engagement with the perceptive process of change arises, something akin to what Henri Bergson has described as interfacing with the flow of duration.
It uses a Bela board (https://bela.io/) with an HC-SR04 proximity sensor, force sensing resistor, electret mic and 2 small speaker cones.
Pure Data patch/visual score:
Mind map:
References:
Basanta, A. (2015) ‘Extending Musical Form Outwards in Space and Time: Compositional strategies in sound art and audiovisual installations’, Organised Sound, 20(2), pp. 171–181. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1355771815000059.
Bergson, H. (2014) ‘The Perception of Change’, in Key Writings. UK: Bloomsbury Academic (Bloomsbury Revelations), p. 521.
Blesser, B. and Salter, L.-R. (2009) Spaces speak, are you listening? Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
Bonnet, F.J. and Szendy, P. (2016) The Order of Sounds: A Sonorous Archipelago. Translated by R. Mackay. Falmouth: Urbanomic (Mono, 2).
Seznec, Y. (2019) ‘Volume 3: Everything You Love Will One Day Be Taken From You – The Book of Knowledge of Impractical Musical Devices’. Available at: https://www.impracticaldevices.com/volume-3/ (Accessed: 3 December 2022).
Snyder, B. (2000) Music and memory: an introduction. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.