Exploration of purpose and form

Over the past week I've been playing around with various way to present and formailse ideas which revolve around the fusion of visual and sound aesthetics. The following examples are ideas that have been largely influenced by the work of sound artists Felix Hess, Rolf julius and Robin Minard.


Music for a stone: an ink stone weighing down a piezo transducer with cardboard resonator.

This is essentially an idea I've borrowed in part from sound artist Felix Hess where he uses a stone to weigh down a piezo transducer on a thin cardboard or balsa wood resonator. The contact between the transducer and resonator causes a signal to be amplified. By elevativing the resonator with a matchstick - creating a tiny pocket of air - this causes the signal to be amplified a bit more. I've had some inky stones lying about for a month or so, and I thought it would be interesting to incorporate this into Hess' idea as it adds another element of detail.


Music for a garden: position loudspeakers in a plum tree

This is relatively self-explanetory I suppose in that it is a cute sound sculpture for a garden environment, in this case my backyard. Rolf Julius' work in this field examines the relationship between constructed sound objects and natural surrounding sound objects, in many cases the constructed sounds mimic the natural sounds so they are barely perceptible from each other. A lopsided plum tree seemed liked an appropriate and visually attractive place to position some baby loudspeakers.


Music for a room: loudspeakers attached to a door

This serves a similar functional purpose to that of Music for a garden. Borrowing from Robin Minard's aesthetic of sound to condition and articulate spaces, I played a recent piece Music For Tidy Spaces at a low volume to explore this idea. The loudspeaker arrangement on the door also mirrors Minard's work strongly.

I've also posted this entry at the research blog.