I stopped by at the New Media Gallery in New Westminster on my way home from Surrey the other day. They currently have an exhibiton with four pieces exploring the nature and epistemology of sound. I found it rather fascinating, and there is not much stopping you from going as it’s right by the new west skytrain station (in the anvil building) and the entrance fee is optional donation.
Adam Basanta’s displays his piece Pirouettem where he uses the interaction between speakers and a revolving microphone to venture into a generative soundmaking through feedback loops.
What in its most common and uncontrolled form results in unpleasant sensory overload as the input/output of a sound system spins out of control and shrieks horribly just as someone attempts a speech is here tamed and displayed in a precise and beautiful way. Controlling audio feedback loops is hardly something new though. A master of making art of such noise was Jimi Hendrix who not only used it to paint deep and dense sound-walls with his guitar in a controlled studio evironment but got so comfortable with the technique that he could improvise on the fly. Check out the start of this performance to see how he plays the phenomenon like an instrument.
Add yours Comments – 2
Fantastic! I am really glad you visited the New Media Gallery, and I am looking forward to seeing the show. I also appreciate that you’ve connected this to Hendrix…
I really like Adam Basanta’s use of movement and simple acoustic properties, as parameters to manipulate sound, at a time when digital processing is omnipresent. There is something entrancing in watching the microphone pivot, and hearing the sound shift at the same time.
I have been curious and reading about the materiality of sound. It rather seems that there are multiple materialities, depending on whom you read, and what they focus on: the materiality of sound sources, technological sound mediation, psychoacoustic properties…
In this case I feel the piece draws me to the materiality of sound propagating through air, evoking the feeling of leaning in to hear closer and better, but with the detached regularity of a clock’s hand.
In terms of the feedback loops I am reminded of the famous piece by Alvin Lucier – I am sitting in a room – in which he iteratively plays and records a short text in a room. As the sound repeatedly reverberates in the space, it gradually dissolves into beautiful harmonics and overtones with barely a hint of the original intonation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAxHlLK3Oyk