5000 Calls - Prime Installation (2000 - )

The installation is designed as an ever-changing 'crowd system' where the many fragments of vocalisations are programmed to interact with each other in different ways, at different times. A customised delivery system is programmed to distribute sound in ever-changing ways to 80 loudspeakers mounted throughout the site.

NAWIC 2000 Arup Award for Achievement in Design

"Remarkable"
Philippe Régnier, The Art Newspaper No. 105, London, July 2000

"Public art too often devolves into compromised cliché as vested interests 'negotiate' the outcome. 5000 Calls survives this process and demonstrates a role for new media arts in this area."
Paul Brown, RealTime No. 36, Sydney, April 2000

"5000 Calls...comes as a complete surprise both in its functioning and in what it says about the inclusive possibilities for the creation of public art in highly visible venues... It utterly transgresses presumptions of the monumental generally associated with privileged outdoor sites... 5000 Calls literally haunts the site, blurring the delineation of public and private, presence and absence, celebration and distress."
Alex Gawronski, Real Time No. 40, Sydney, December 2000

"5000 Calls is at once the most evocative and evasive of all the works here."
Felicity Fenner, Art in America, May 2001

Sources

BREATHING EQUIPMENT / Assisted breathing using aqualung, hospital respirator

CATTLE HERDING / Male and female stockmen / Central Queensland

CHILDBIRTH / Mothers' labour at the moment of birth

CHILD IN BATH / Imitating aeroplanes, cars and ships

DANCING / Tentative breathing while rehearsing a new work

DEAFBLIND SIGNING / Spontaneous vocalisations while communicating in sign language

DEFENCE FORCES / Parade calls, artillery drill, commando unit

DIGGING A WELL / Hollering calls of a work chant / Bangladesh

DOG OBEDIENCE SCHOOL / Short commands to animals; sounds of encouragement

FIRST BREATH / Kane Myers and Honor Enright-Miller / Recorded by their fathers

HEALING SOUNDS / Taoist healing sounds for lung, kidney, liver, heart and spleen

HOTEL / Overheard adult laughter and play / Kings Cross

MARKETPLACE / Intoned, rhythmic invitations to come and buy / Victoria Market

MORNING PRAYERS / Holy man chanting Hindu mantras on the Ganges / Varanasi, India

MOURNING / Woman mourning outside hospital / Kampot, Cambodia

PAINTING A PORTRAIT / Sounds of thinking, gasps and laughter

PROTEST / Students protest against uranium mining; Rally for Aboriginal land rights

REHABILITATION HOSPITAL / Stroke patients and their therapists

RENOVATING A KITCHEN / Sounds of thinking during heavy labour

SHEEP MUSTER / Vocal signals and whistles to sheep dogs

STREET CALLS / Calls from the streets of Brooklyn, Sydney and New Delhi

STUDENT PARTY / Late-night shouts heard over the fence

TIDAL WAVE DESCRIPTION / Survivors imitating the sound of the tsunami / Papua New Guinea

YOGA / Slow meditative breathing and chanting

Sports Sources

AUSTRALIAN FOOTBALL LEAGUE / Grand Final crowd, Essendon v Carlton

BASEBALL / U/14's Grand Final

BASKETBALL / Australian Institute of Sport (AIS) Women's and Men's teams

BEACH VOLLEYBALL / Women's World Open, Italy v US at Melbourne Park

CRICKET / International Ashes series, Sheffield Shield and suburban matches

DRAGON BOAT RACING / Footscray Canoe Club on Maribyrnong River

GRADE ONE THREE-LEGGED RACE / Caulfield South Primary sports day

GYMNASTICS / Coach's calls / Australian Institute of Sport, Welsh Institute of Sport

HOCKEY / Welsh Women's Hockey Team, Cardiff

KICK BOXING / Fitzroy Stars Aboriginal Community Youth Club gym

LAWN BOWLS / Doncaster Bowling Club

NETBALL / AIS Netball team

RUGBY LEAGUE / Sydney City Roosters in training: rob the nest, defence shuttle drill

RODEO / Yeehah's from the crowd / Melbourne Park

ROWING / AIS Women's Pairs, Women's 8s, Cox's calls

RUGBY UNION / Australian schoolboy's state teams championships

SKATEBOARDING / Teenage skateboarders

SOCCER / U/12s, U/8 coach losing her voice, Falcons women's team

SOCCER WORLD CUP QUALIFIER / Australia v Iran, 1997

TENNIS / Australian Open 1999

VOLLEYBALL / AIS Women's and Men's teams

WATERPOLO / State selection trials for Victorian Women's team

WEIGHTLIFTING / Kenyan call to give strength / Oceania team

WRESTLING / Freestyle and Greco-Roman / Oceania team in training

Song Sources

ARABIC / Highly ornamented melodic lines / Ghazi Nassouh

BUDDHIST / Deep-voiced harmonic chanting / Dalai Lama's Guyto Monks of Tibet

BULGARIAN / Exclamatory calls in song to a female leader hiding in the hills / Silvia Entcheva

CAMBODIAN / Buddhist group chanting in village

CHILEAN / Love songs with quivering vocalisations / Hernan Flores

CHINESE / Call to lover on a nearby mountain / Dong Xiao-Meng

DERVISH / Chanting / North Sudan

GAELIC / Slow airs in the Sean-nós singing style / Maurice Scanlon

GEORGIAN / Working songs, healing songs, rain call / Nino Tsitsishvili, Joseph Jordania

GREEK ORTHODOX / Call and response from the Easter Service / Father Dimitropoulos

INDIAN AND SRI LANKAN / Improvisations on traditional ragas / Narmatha Ravichandhira

ISLAMIC / Melismatic call to prayer / Belal Assaad, Preston Mosque

JEWISH / Song for Yom Kippur / Rabbi Lubofsky, St Kilda Synagogue

KIRIBATI / Micronesian chant accompanying a war-like stick dance / Banaba Island

MAORI / Menacing vocal display of the Haka / Michael Tuffery

PAPUA NEW GUINEAN / Funeral song celebrating life / Olive Tau Davis

RUSSIAN / Song asking the frost to spare the life of a man and his horse / Zulya Kamalova

SLOVENIAN / Songs about separation and returning home / Dusan Kobal

SOUTH AFRICAN / Joyful, rousing work chants / Valanga Khoza

TARTAR / Love songs with birds, berries, nightingales and butterflies / Zulya Kamalova

TUVALUAN / "Speech/song" of Polynesian calls to ancestors, challenge calls / Keleta Avene

VIETNAMESE / Boat person's river chants / Dang Kim Hien

WELSH / Song calling out the names of all that can be seen from the hilltop / Julie Murphy

WEST AFRICAN / Fertility song, harvest workers' song / Epizo Bangoura

Technical Processes

We digitised these large chunks of location recordings, for the painstaking process of isolating the short expressive vocalisations that we were looking for - vocalisations which often occur in-between the words (gasps, sighs, different weights of breath) and the involuntary vocalisations made as a result of physical action. We used a number of techniques to then further refine these short moments, isolating the individual voices from the often noisy and complex acoustic environments of the original recordings.

It was important for us not to tamper with the original qualities of the voices for this is what makes them so compelling. We tried to remove only the extraneous sounds, to bring the listener right up close to the soundmakers, revealing an almost uncanny sense of clarity.

The core of the delivery system is a Pentium III with an external Hard Drive where each of the 5000 individual vocalisations is stored as an individual sound file. Selected sound files can be instantly accessed and sent to particular loudspeakers to form part of the combination of "crowd events" at any particular time. The system is programmed to firstly select and then deliver particular groups of sound to the 80 loudspeakers discreetly distributed through the 4.5 hectare site. To help achieve this, 24 individual channels of cabling - totalling some 5 km - were built into the site.

The system was designed in conjunction with Resonant Designs, the company involved in developing the specialist software. Krypton Audio Server [© Isotope] allows complex programming of the order and distribution of sound files. This combines with AutoMate [© Isotope] which allows programming of the delivery of the sound groups. Much of the programming occurred on site, where we made careful adjustments over several week-long periods while listening to our own developing real-time crowd of voices.

Artists

• Chesworth & Leber
• Chesworth, David (1958 - )
• Leber, Sonia (1959 - )

Site

• Sydney Olympic Park

Works by Same Artist

• 5000 Calls - Cardiff, Five Thousand Calls - Cardiff (2002)
• 5000 Calls - Ljubljana, Five Thousand Calls - Ljubljana (2003)
• The Master's Voice (2001 - )
• The Persuaders (2003)
• Proximities: Local histories / Global entanglements (2006 - )

Books

• 5000 Calls, Sydney Olympic Park Public Arts Program Catalogue, Sydney, 2000. [ Details... ]

Journal Articles

• 'Chorus of Approval', 24 Hours, March, 2002. [ Details... ]
• Leber, Sonia & David Chesworth, '5000 Calls', Earshot Soundscape Journal, December, 2001. [ Details... ]

Newspaper Articles

• Gawronski, Alex, 'Game Over? The Olympics Arts Commissions', Real Time, no. 40, December, 2000. [ Details... ]
• Regnier, Philipe, 'Art and the Olympics', The Art Newspaper, no. 105, July, 2000. [ Details... ]