Work
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Australian Sound Design Project
Work
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Light (2003) |
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| Gallery Installation | ||
| Location: bus Gallery, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia | ||
| Light and spatial sound installation by Camilla Hannan. |
Details | |
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Though the creation of new environments my intention is to recreate the familiar. We get so used to certain sounds in our landscape that we no longer hear them. For Light, I took location recordings of Davies and Baird Steel Foundry in Coburg. I spent 3 - 4 days at the foundry taken around by the foreman. What struck me most about this process was the engagement of the workers with their environment. Many of the workers had been with the company for a number of years, some for over twenty. They were immune to the sound of the furnaces, the arc welders, and the steel cranes. Through the inherent nature of recording, the location sounds became very different, particularly when devoid of visual cues. I was intrigued by this abstraction which became the basis of my installation at bus Gallery in October 2003. These initial location recordings were digitally processed using sampling techniques into a 6-channel composition. I used dense layers to simulate a wall of noise that would envelop the participant. This replicated the intense noise in the foundry. (At times during recording, I had to wear earplugs). I wanted the participant to feel saturated by the sound. Within Gallery 3 at bus I suspended a cross axis of steel cable anchored at each of the ceiling corners. From this I suspended 600 blue ‘icicle’ LED lights in varying lengths and positioning around the room. To move around the room the participant had to brush though lighting strands. These lights went on and off in random patterns. The room was pitch black except for these lights. The light strands were invisible in the dark without their luminance. The unpredictability of lighting was a crucial part of the installation experience. A person entered the space through a black curtain; small lights may light up directly in front of their face, unsettling them while they become used to the darkness. The majority of humanity relies on visual cues to orientate themselves. When these visual cues become unreliable the sonic cues are thrown into the foreground of perception. When the sound is that of furnaces and arc welders moving around the space, the resultant experience can be very powerful For four of the speakers, I used car speakers. The reason for this being their ability to be suspended easily from the cables at approximate ear level and their compactness of tonality and frequency response. A further two conventional studio monitors were placed in two corners of the room. (See Diagram a for detail of speak placement). By suspending speakers, I was able to create an immersive listening environment outside the conventional 5.1 set up. The sound composition was a loop of 15 minutes. I placed a 2-metre bench in the space so that people could spend extended periods engaging with the work. A fireman came in to the exhibition. He said that ‘Light’ reminded him of going in to a burning building because of the unpredictability of the lights and the intense waves of moving sound. This perception seemed to engage with my ideas of sonic memory and environmental displacement. | |
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Published by The University of Melbourne Comments, questions, corrections and additions: i.mott@unimelb.edu.au Prepared by: Acknowledgements Updated: 18 January 2007 http://www.sounddesign.unimelb.edu.au/web/biogs/P000586b.htm |
