Tuning the Space
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Soeine: We decide to develop the idea of using water dropping sound to generate overtones. We can put a container on the ground as a receiver of the water drops from above, and the amount of the water inside the receive will determine the tone of the water dropping. As the water is collected in the receiver the tone of the the water dropping will change. In terms of performance, at first the tone and rhythm of the water dropping from each bottle will be generated in a random fashion, and then gradually these individual tones and rhythms will be harmonized by my action of adding or subtracting water in the bottle hanging from the ceiling or the in the receiver on the floor. My performance will be based on my intention to tune the tones of the water drops and harmonize the rhythms of the water drops.
As soon as I arrived in Malmö, Sweden, on 11 November, 2020, we started brainstorming ideas for the project. Here are some sketches that we made during the brainstorming session. We intend to continue gathering ideas and creating protocol models until we move to the Red Room, the biggest room at the center, to make more substantial constructions from these models.
Soeine: I was inspired by the work of a female Japanese artist, Chiharu Shiota, renowned for her vast, room-spanning webs of threads or hoses. In both a literal and metaphorical sense, the physical form of a web seems to work for our project. The subtle acoustic overtones in our work resonate with the lightness of webs. Webs are made of concrete materials, but do not necessarily have fixed shapes. They create a sense of space by dividing the space with their malleable shapes. I compare that quality to that of our shapeless sound. I am fascinated by fractal shapes, like webs or the veins of tree leaves. They look random and yet create sense of harmony, as if all those random threads are part of a single form. I want to create this fractal quality using sound generated by my bodily movements.
Soeine: Lars mentioned the notion of parabola, and I became fascinated by its potential for a site-specific performance in which the audience members can move around while having different experience of sound depending on their location in the space. I was reminded of a curatorial project I did many years ago, called Whispering Gallery. The gallery has walls in the inner part of the space, and the room is divided into smaller segmented spaces by the walls, which are shorter than the height of the room and thus let sound travel through the gap between the top of the walls and the ceiling. Soeine: One of the interesting ideas was using water drops from water bottles to make tones. The water drops will fall into the receivers on the floor, and make different tones and rhythms depending on their distance from the floor and the amount of the water inside the bottles. The sounds of the water drops would start in random tones and rhythms and gradually find harmonious tones and synchronised rhythms. The performer's movement is directed by the effort to facilitate this process of moving from disorganisation towards organisation, and from disorder to order. Once this harmonious order is achieved, the water drops continue to drop without further interventions by the performer. As the amount of the water inside the water bottles decreases, the speed of the water drops will decreases gradually until there is no more water in the bottles and thus no more water drops. Meantime, the performer will operate the second musical device until it is tuned to match the tones and rhythms of the water drops. This act of tuning will be the main subject and 'story' of the performance. We contemplated on using directional lights to visually highlight the water drops while diminishing undesirable visual elements such as the water bottles. Soeine: We chose some of these brainstormed ideas to develop them for the rest of the residency, and gave them working titles: Feedback, Aligning drops, and Flower springs.
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