Sound Work References:
Location: Bell Gallery, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island
Dimensions: 8 x 16 x 3 meters
Extant: February 11 – March 10, 1983
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Books published on the occasion of the inauguration of a sound work:
Max Neuhaus: Sound Installation (Providence, Rhode Island: Bell Gallery, Brown University, 1983).
'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