I went down to the lake on Saturday with my camera and a little loudspeaker in tow. These are some of the pictures I took of the loudspeaker; positioning it at various points around the lake.
Silent.
This is not my idea. German sound artist Rolf Julius started experimenting with this concept a few years ago as he was walking through an abandoned stone quarry in Finland. He didn't have any recording equipment with him, so he took a couple of loudspeakers out to some small ponds and sat them upon some protruding rocks. His intention was to create a 'symbol for hearing'[1] where the artist is '[an] author in perception'[ibid].
A loudspeaker sitting in a natural environment with no sound being played through it strikes up a perculiar paradox. For a loudspeaker is essentially autonomous by nature - in this situation it is one sound source surrounded a multitude of natural (and unnatural) sounds eminating from all peripheral directions. The fact that it sits silent compounds the scenario - does the observer direct their attention to the silent loudspeaker and focus their perception upon sounds coming from that direction? Or does the observer listen to sounds which come from around the loudspeaker? A definitive answer would waste my time, and would probably sound a bit too Zen.
Why did I do this? For one, I thought the loudspeaker could do with some fresh air. More intellectually though, I thought I would use Julius' example to stimulate my imagination a little.
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[1] Julius, Rolf. "It made everything silent", Resonanzen/Resonances: Aspects of Sound Art. (Kehrer: Koln, 2002) p. 118
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