Response to Carsten Nikolai’s “334 m/s” and Tristan Perich’s “Octave”

Emotive Explosions & Nimble Noise

I visited the OTIC exposition at the New Media Gallery in New Westminster on January 30th. Driven by my long time interest in sound, I was curious to see – or hear – what sonic artists could offer. I had no expectations or preconceived notions whatsoever as I had never before been to an exhibition which focused on sound.

The exhibition featured the works of four artists. Unfortunately, the one called “Pirouette” by Adam Basanta was out of order and I couldn’t experience it. However, the other three were up and running, and two of them – “Octave” by Tristan Perich and “334 m/s” by Carsten Nicolai – had quite an impact on me.

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“334 m/s” takes its name from the speed at which sound travels through air. The installation is comprised of two translucent tubes that are filled with propane gas on one end. When the opposite sides are set on fire, a chain reaction follows and the flame burns from one side to the other, slowly accelerating until it hits the end of the tube. The result is unexpected and quite startling small sonic boom.

“Unexpected” is not actually correct. When I first entered the room, the smell of propane gas immediately hit my nostrils with an alarming intensity. Something was not right. I could also tell that by the way the curator kept glancing at the timer on his smartphone as if waiting for something to happen. As he guided me to the Octave installation, he seemed tense and rushing through his spiel. It turned out that he was keeping track of the time before the next build-up of gas and ensuing explosion in order to give me heads-up.

Well, even with his warning in place, I was quite startled to hear the mini explosion. It was a loud pop and visually fascinating, too. The blue ball of flame moved swiftly inside the transparent tube like a small busy comet that died away at the other end. Then all became quiet again, with only the faint hiss of the propane gas tanks filling the tubes. The curator – a bald gentle giant in the funkiest shoes – smiled a tiny smile and finished his piece on “Octave”.

What immediately followed after this first experience was a palpable tension from the anticipation of the next discharge. There was a feeling of vague imminent danger in the air, heightened by the smell of propane gas that filled up the room. It made me think of the anxiety that is permeating our daily lives – the anticipation of an important event, of meeting someone, of being expected to perform in a certain way. On a more subtle level, it spoke of the deep-seated fear of what the future might have in store for us, of not being able to control your life, of being mortal.

On the plus side, the very anticipation itself made me focus more on the present moment. While counting down the minutes and seconds before the next explosive sound, I became tuned in to each fleeting moment – I started paying more attention to my surroundings, to my bodily motions and sensations, and to my thoughts. It thus became a sort of mediation on the passage of time.

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“Octave”, on the other hand, was a soothing albeit a noisy experience. It is essentially a series of 12 metal panels each containing 25 speakers (300 speakers in total), mounted on a wall. Each speaker plays a single microtonal frequency, collectively spanning four octaves, with increments of 1/32 octave within each panel, and one whole octave between panels. The result is a study of musical intervals as “a dense continuum of microtonal pitch.”

When one initially faces the wall with the speakers, all that is heard is dense white noise. However, as one approaches closely the individual panels, and then each individual speaker, the audible differences between the tones are clearly perceived. The effect is dramatically augmented if the listener is moving quickly from one panel to the next, or even between individual speakers on the same panel with an ear close to the speakers.

So it was only when I walked – or rather, almost ran – alongside the wall that the sound transformed itself from an uniform faceless noise into a distinctive progression from low to high tones. It suddenly became a structured, coherent tonal piece. A piece, which I created with my own movement through space, shaping it right there on the spot. It was perceived not through time, but through space, and the narrative of sound was thus transformed from temporal to a spatial one.

To me, “Octave” means that moving – or, more broadly, travelling – helps make sense of the world. Put in another way, the lack of motion implies incoherence, senselessness and chaos, whereas movement is structured, imbued with the listener’s personality and purposeful. In that sense, it connects to the notion that the human body is the indispensable medium – or the agent – of experience, as Bernadette Wegenstein claims in her essay “Body”. It’s the way our bodies relate to a meaningless world to produce a meaning by way of spatial positioning.