1986
SOUND INSTALLATIONS - TECHNIQUES AND PROCESSES
The Work For The Bell Gallery at Brown University with Asides And Allusions.
Although most people are not aware of it, sound is as important an aspect of how we perceive a place as the way it looks. We of course sense the size of a space with our ears as well as our eyes, and our sense of position and motion may come from aural as well as visual cues. Perhaps more important than these psychoacoustic phenomena though, is that the feeling of the basic nature of a place and ourselves within it is determined as much by sound as sight.
The starting point for a work for me, is the space itself -- the sound which already exists there, the nature of its acoustic and its social context. Working in the context of a museum or gallery like the one at Brown is always a challenge -- I have to find a way of restoring the space to its natural state as a room. Emptying the space of visual elements is the first step in this direction, especially when the space has a tradition of being used to exhibit visual art.
I usually begin a work by defining the sound sources or the way sound enters the space. The loudspeaker, I find to be a rather uninteresting sound source in itself. I use it simply as a transducer; a means of translating the sound from electrical to acoustic form. Rather than using sound directly form a loudspeaker, I usually use the surfaces of the environment themselves as the sources of sound.
The most interesting acoustic shapes in the Bell Gallery were the corners. There were many -- room dividers formed twelve extra corners in the space (drawing 1). By pointing speakers from the ceiling, angled so that they couldn't be heard directly, into each corner, the corners themselves, with their complex patterns of reflection and acoustic shadows, became the perceived sources of sound. Six electronic sound generators were connected to different groupings of the sixteen sources so that each sound generator formed a three dimensional shape composed of two or three corners in the space.
I have always used electronics to generate the sounds of my installations, in spite of its bad reputation in the cultural community. It is simply the best "paint" we have for sound today. One might even say it is the first paint for sound -- the first real means for constructing and shaping sound images. The arguments about "acoustic" as opposed to electronic sound sources appear false to me. People working with sound have always seemed to utilize the most advanced technology of their time. Pianos don't grow on trees, but are, in fact, rather antique sound synthesizers from the mechanical age. A sound generated electronically is just as "real" as a sound made by a piano or violin.
The distinction between electronic and other kinds of sound was originally made, I think, because of the primitive nature of early electronic sound sources; sounds made electronically then had a distinct character. We have obviously gone beyond that point if we can listen to music recorded electronically and not call it electronic sound. I believe the question for an artist is not so much what we use to make something, but what we do with it. For me, the transition of moving from using mechanical sound sources to electronic ones was a gradual one. It began while I was still working as a percussionist. Knowing nothing about electronics, I became intrigued with the possibilities of extending the tone color of the traditional instruments I was working with. At that time there were few electronic sound making or processing devices available.
I began teaching myself about electronic circuits which could make and change sounds. I began very simply. For Fan Music (1968), I built eight electro-mechanical solar sound sources. Ventilating fans placed between photocells and the sun generated a sound waveform which changed in tone color as the sun moved across the sky, and disappeared as it set. The work was made for an urban terrain, the multi-leveled rooftops of four adjoining buildings in lower Manhattan. The sources were dispersed on different levels to form an aural topography to fit the physical terrain.
I was interested in working with large groups of independent sound sources. The ideas about stereo and quadrophonic sound seemed to have more to do with re-creation than creating. The real sound world we live in is, in fact, formed by a multitude of sound sources each one contributing a small part of the whole. I became interested in trying to work on this level of complexity. During the years up until 1979, I built a special set of sound sources for each work. As my work became concerned with larger groups of sound sources, I became interested in computers as a means to control arrays of sound generators.
One of the most powerful ways of refining a sound one is building is to compare several versions of it. Our sound memory is more relative than our visual one, so the number of comparisons possible and the speed of moving between them becomes a crucial factor, in fine tuning. In the mid-seventies when the first microcomputers appeared, I began experimenting; using them to edit, store, retrieve and compare complex sound structures for many independent sound sources. A good example is the permanent work which I made for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, with thirty sound sources. It was realized in two stages. First with a small portable computer of my own fashioning to select the works pitches by ear in the space, and then the construction and installation of a dedicated system to generate them permanently.
In the process conceiving architectural structures, computers are now used to simulate the physical reality; utilizing their facility and flexibility as a means of design. When we use a computer to generate sound, on the other hand, one is at the same time also able to create the physical reality, a very great advantage -- the reality is as malleable as a model.
The early days of making sound with computers were plagued with many difficulties, the major one being the inability to hear what you were doing. The machine took so long to calculate the sound that inmany institutions the combination of computing time and bureaucracy meant that it took a week after you had made something before you could hear it.
Our technology still can't measure things which the ear can hear and the science of psychoacoustics has only begun to sketch the outlines of what sound means to us. Science and the language of mathematics, albeit precise, can only give us a limited description of our sound reality. The most powerful means we have of directing the creation of sound is the ear in conjunction with the mind. To try to make a sound work without hearing is analogous to trying to drive a car without seeing.
The low cost and sophistication of the current crop of electronic sound generators and shapers has now moved the possibility of using computers to work with sound, out of the institution and into the hands of individuals. Because these machines are designed specifically to make sound, it is usually quite easy to hear what you are doing.
This work at the Bell Gallery used the first version of a computer controlled sound generator array which I built to use as a basic tool for not just one work, but many. The system consisted of sixty-four independent sound generators under the control of a microcomputer. The computer allowed sets of sound generator parameter values to be chosen and patterns of these values which varied in time, to be created and compared.
Because the space is as an important a sound dimension as the sound itself for me, I need to be able to shape sound from any point in the space of a work. Therefore the problem of hearing what I am doing has another dimension. It becomes hearing what I am doing, WHERE I am doing it, hence I have a need for a system which I can operate by remote control. It allows me to make sounds and structures -- changing and quickly comparing them - from any point in the installation site. In this preliminary version of the system I used a long cable connected to a battery operated TV monitor and a light pen.
At the present time (1986), the array I am using is a network of sound generating computers. It extends the original concept by making each source an independent computer. Rather than one central computer trying to control the huge number of parameters in a large array of sound generators, the central computer distributes programs to the individual computers of the array. Each of these in turn controls its own sound generator. This architecture allows the expansion of the array, at will: each module added has the computing power to take care of itself. The remote control unit is now wireless and has a range of a half mile for large scale installations.
For the work in the Bell Gallery I used a subset of the early system. After fixing the corners of the space as sources of sound, I spent time exploring their character and the character of the room itself with different kinds of sound -- moving around the space, making sounds, listening from various points -- building up a collection of sounds for the space and getting a feeling for how they worked there. I decided to use a series of short clicks -- quasi-pitched sounds like finger snapping which I could vary in tone color.
I was interested in creating a strong sound image which would seem to move around the space like a kind of aural lightning flash, but very, very subtle and soft. I decided to make a five click phrase and move it through overlapping channels. The click phrase was a little less than a second long and consisted of five fast pulses followed by an equal period of silence. Each phrase was composed of linked pulse pairs. The first click of a phrase appeared in one channel shape. The second click was actually composed of two simultaneous clicks -- a click from the new channel shape along with the repetition of the first channel. The third click was a third channel shape and a repeat of the second channel, and so forth. This structure linked the perception of the pulses into a phrase which seemed to pivot as it moved around the room -- each new phrase with a different pathway. Independent of the evolution of these click phrase pathways was a second evolution of click timbre -- the tone color of the click changed from light/high to dark/low and back again at an independent speed in each channel.
These sound installations of mine use sound to actualize imaginary places -- places to explore aurally or simply to be in. The sound is not the work, the place is -- the sound is only the catalyst which creates the sense of place.
The listener entering the Bell Gallery was confronted with an empty space -- he began to find his place when he first noticed the sound.
Max Neuhaus, November 1986