Playing the room
Author: Blogger in Residence, Anna Disley-Simpson
Happy New Year! This week I’ll be talking about some of my favourite examples of sound installations.
I first encountered this medium directly in the summer of 2014 during the Reverb festival, curated by Imogen Heap for the Roundhouse in Camden, London. In the deep dark tunnels of the Hub of the building was the Helmholtz Exhibit, a sight by which I was totally captivated. Named after the physicist famous for his research on visual and sonic perception, the exhibit has been described as a “space where sound is visible”, combining art, science and music to explore how sound travels around us.
Conceived by duo Wintour’s Leap, the project is a highly interactive installation piece made up of thousands of suspended LED lights with microphones on them, circuited so that each individual light is highly responsive to noise. Though the bulbs respond to any sound, the directors of the project discovered early on that Helmholtz is at its most beautiful when music is played within it. Punters of the festival were encouraged to not be merely spectators, but to bring an instrument, their voice, or anything else that made a noise, in order that they would be able to experiment with the installation for themselves.
You can find a video of Guitar and Harp duo, Sam Brookes and Olivia Jageurs, on the project’s old Kickstarter page here.
I adore traditional concert music; so far in my career, it’s what I know best and there are reasons why certain customs have stayed prevalent for centuries now. There is a certain set of expectations, even in the contemporary music world still, that include the separation boundary between audience and performance space, the notion of a set piece of music that is performed and followed by applause, the assumption that an audience should be still, silent observers rather than active participants, and so forth. I find projects such as Helmholtz that challenge these ideas immensely exciting.
I am most moved by the immersive nature of an installation piece, how that often it draws me away from the parameters of pitch and rhythm to which I’ve grown so accustomed to favouring, that it can be something to walk away from and revisit of my own accord, that talking about the experience at the time rather than waiting until afterwards is seemingly encouraged, and that it almost always relies on a certain level of interaction between the audio and the visual.
A great illustrator for that last point is the audio-visual brainchild of musician David McFarlane. With a particular interest in innovative ways to create music using technology, David built the Rain Box, a pleasingly beautiful object that makes a sound any time a drop of rain hits its surface. Seen in action here, albeit through a makeshift method, we can hear that when water hits the box, it plays a bell sound along with a recording of someone saying their name. Devised as part of the Manchester International Festival last year, this idea has resulted in a piece that is collaborative (the voice recordings were all emailed to David in response to a call-out), charmingly aleatoric, and something that has the power to unfold before us, that can be left to its own devices, producing sound with very minimal human intervention.
An artist also working at the forefront of this field is Ryoko Akama. Her work “engages with mundane objects and invisible energies such as magnetism and gravity, employing small and fragile objects such as paper balloons and glass bottles in order to create tiny aural and visual occurrences that embody ‘almost nothing’ aesthetics” (from her website biography). These delicate acoustic collages that she creates enlists the listener to detect the fragile subtleties and tiny sonic changes within the work, with the positioned objects collaborating and intermingling as a whole as well as independently and concurrently. One of my favourite works of hers that I recently discovered, Failed Experiments, you can delve into here (there are videos if you scroll down!).
I love how she, and many installation musicians, explore how to toy with an audience’s perception, occasionally keeping the source of a noise under wraps and ensuring that there is sonic information coming from all directions, resulting in an all-encompassing three-dimensional experience. Again, the inextricable links between the audio and visual information are something that I am fascinated by and hope to explore in future compositional projects!
Written by Anna Disley-Simpson