For our second Readymades assignment, we were tasked with creating a “Sound Object”. Our readymade was to be given a personality using only sound as an output. Max was to be used as the platform for making the sounds.
After thinking constantly about the idea of a readymade (and seeing them everywhere), I decided I wanted to use a wicker basket that I owned. The basket had some compelling properties to me. It is stiff, glazed with some kind of plastic to make it sturdy, and somewhat sharp at point. But it also looks natural, has a warm color, and I habitually will run my hands across it to make different noises.
Lately I’ve also been thinking about “mapping” sensory inputs in different ways that could produce interesting results. For example, consider that your ears are a certain distance apart from each other. Now imagine if you placed two microphones a similar distance apart. If you increased the distance between the microphones, you might be simulating what it was like to hear when your head was that much larger. If you reduced the distance to half, or a quarter, you might be perceptually “shrinking” yourself by that amount. I decided to use these thoughts as a prompt for my sound object assignment.
Multiple microphones are placed inside of the basket. These microphones feed into a multichannel audio I/O Max patch, which then processes and routes the microphone input to multiple speakers positioned outside of the basket and around the viewer. A pre-recorded recording of me rubbing, tapping, knocking, and playing with the basket loops until the microphones detect noise. When noise is detected, then the loop stops playing, and the microphones are positionally routed to the speakers.
My attempt is to prompt a meditation of a “box within a box” infinite regression. When making noise, you can become aware that something inside the box hears what is going on outside. You hear these noises, as they are positioned around and above you in a square configuration. While an out of body experience can also be a meaningful appreciation of the piece, my true attempt was to invoke the realization that the viewer is also in a box (the room). This box is also in a larger box, the building, etc, conceptually stretching outwards into the concept of space itself.
There were some technical challenges in creating the piece in regards to sourcing the proper microphones, speakers and calibrating the noise levels in the Max patch. I am happy with this first pass, however. If an opportunity to further refine the concept presents itself, I would have a solid knowledge base to build off of.