RESONANCE CONCERT NO. 3 (15.09.2019)
Introduction by music curator Svein Terje Torvik. Streamed on the Henie Onstad Art Channel 09.04 - 16.04.2019
RESONANCE CONCERT NO. 3 (15.09.2019)
Streamed on the Henie Onstad Art Channel 09–16.04.2019.
Performers: Magnus Myhr, Bernt Isak Wærstad, Kristine Tjøgersen, Jan Martin Smørdal.
Video: Mikkis Recording Company; sound mastering and colour correction: Bernt Isak Wærstad.
PHOTO DOCUMENTATION
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Sculptural sound installation in a 10 m diameter circular landscape of resonant speaker membranes made from copper centred around a core of 12 sensor-activated string columns.
Some rooms are like magnetic poles, they vibrate in the voids,
between the materials, between the relationships.
In practice this is conspicuously concrete – a sound fits into my hand, a string between two chairs.
Are not sound and space created from voids just as sound contrasts with silence?
Is it not in the voids between the specific that we can become intimate with entities such as
silence, vibration, realisation and mass?
I can feel another body, let us say sound waves, as bodies in the air, between sender and recipient.
They become a memory in my flesh.
I want to rest my forehead against it.
Resonance is a sensor-driven instrument which is activated when the audience move around inside it. The installation comprises a circle of vibrating speaker membranes made from copper with a core of sensor-activated string columns. Together they make up a tactile space in which the interaction between resonance, air and sound waves makes it possible to actively take part in a sonic experience.
During the Ultima festival in 2019 the work was exhibited as an independent installation and as an extended instrument performed by, and in dialogue with the musicians Bernt Isak Wærstad, Kristine Tjøgersen, Jan Martin Smørdal and dancer Magnus Myhr. The hourly concerts lasted 20 minutes each, with no announced beginning or end. Between the concerts the installation would be activated for audience interaction. Visitors could come and go as they pleased.
Central to the work is the physical experience of material, space and resonance. The installation’s encircling copper panels act both as an object in the space and as a setting into which the audience can step. In sculptural terms, the installation shares a kinship with minimalist sculpture, whereby the content is focused on the situation, the experience and the time it takes to explore the work. The installation’s copper panels encircle a void where resonance, sound waves, air, light and human bodies come together in a sensory experience.
The floor of the space is divided into zones observed by a camera. The activity inside these zones – that is, the presence of the audience and the duration of their presence and movements – is used as a factor that triggers different arbitrary chains in an aleatory composition programmed in MaxMSP. The programme sends commands to twelve string columns that form a core in the middle of the space. The sound of the string columns is then sent back to three transducer speakers within each of the copper panels (six panels and 18 transducers in total). The transducers excite the copper panels, which resonate like speaker membranes and colour the sonic quality with their own resonance. At certain frequencies the resonance triggers a physical vibration in the material so that the copper sounds almost like a cymbal and reflects the light in the room like the sun shining on the water’s surface during a blood-red sunset.
The string columns are made from hollow metal pipes, cast into a narrow foundation made from concrete and Giloform brilliant white. The columns are varnished with a matt black finish. Each column are fitted with three strings all facing in different directions where the pipe has been trisected. Each string is equipped with a hand-wound pickup which captures the sound of the string.
The columns are divided into two groups: electromagnetic columns and solenoid columns. Each solenoid column has a small hammer which, on cue, strike the string, creating a pizzicato. The electromagnetic columns are equipped with two electromagnets which, responding to alternate and varying electric currents, take turns to be the dominant exciter, i.e. they “fight” over which overtones should sound. In this alternation between overtones there is a transitional phase between the dominant tones in which the entire register of overtones chimes in.
While developing the project I became interested in Pythagoras’ string theory. Pythagoras believed that the inner being of things could be represented by numbers, such as in the relationship between the length of a string and the pitch of the note that it produces.1 Once you start to make these connections, it is fascinating to discover how closely interwoven all of physics is, such as how the ratio between length, depth and width determines acoustics in architecture.2
Looking at the floor of the installation Resonance, it forms a permeable membrane, which visitors can move through in the direction of the core, or around, following the outside of the walls. In the technical drawings, it looks like a perforated circle. The string columns also form a wedge-shaped entity which stretches outwards from the middle of the space beyond the limit of the circle.
The people inside the space, whether audience or participating artists, determine by their presence and patterns of movement which sound waves are activated in the space. The people also serve as resonant materials as they block and absorb the sound waves, thus changing the direction and intensity of the sound. If we visually superimpose these sound waves and movements onto the floor, the floor comes to resemble a graphic score of the event, in which time, action and physics (the instrumentation) make up the composition.
I discover Toru Takemitsu’s circular scores3 and think that I could have interpreted it in terms of space, mass and time.
I share these ideas with the musicians and the dancer who improvise during the concerts at the Henie Onstad Art Centre. They become familiar with the instrumentation and soundscape that the installation produces and receive basic instructions such as to calibrate their activities in relation to a single tone and how to process different qualities such as velocity, duration, harmony, disharmony. They must respond to the sound that is already in the room (determined by the audience’s interactions in the intervals between the concerts) as they enter, to the number of people there are in the room and to how the audience acts during the concert and how the social dramaturgy develops. The musicians and dancer improvise on the basis of these premises, and it is their individual vocabularies that come to the fore as they interact with the work.
Thus, the work also resides within the total sum of experiences of the shared setting. The work exists within the individual experiences that each and every participant carries with them. The process of creating the work was always a balancing act that seeks to build a structure capable of triggering an augmented use of our senses while still making room for different interpretations. It is that very sensory aspect that I wanted to home in on; not one specific meaning.
In the technological development of Resonance, I have collaborated closely with Bernt Isak Wærstad, Roar Sletteland and Jonas Barsten.
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