Can sound have agency?
Lecture by Dr. Ted Krueger at EMPAC
I’m a big fan of the audio research done of EMPAC at Rensselaer after attending a Spatial Audio workshop some years back. So I jumped at the opportunity to be enlightened by a whole symposium on transducer-based music since I knew very little about this type of sonic art.
Most fascinating to me was a lecture by Ted Krueger, an Architecture professor at Rensselaer. He “experiments” with sending a “frequency at a constant amplitude” to a large steel plate and he records the result. What can happen when sending a constant pitch to a steel plate you may ask? Well, he played a portion of a 9 hour recording and lots did happen. As we watched a condensed sound wave of the recording, we heard spectral variations that were very surprising and even some instances when the lower partials of a sound resulted in major chords. For me, this was a musically interesting occurrence and I became excited about how his experiments could be used in notated music as a model for musical form. This is the basis for Spectral music of course, but for some reason in this instance of charting resonance over a longer period of time, I got it.
Dr. Krueger then went on to offer some possible reasons for why his 9 hour recording produced such interesting results. He theorized that it could be the materials or any number of other properties in the room shaping sound. Could it be that these factors might even “have agency and voice? “(Insert mind blown emoji here) This was a big assertion about our physical world and how little we know about it. I was reminded of discovery of root systems of trees and how they communicate (“The Hidden Life of Trees” by Peter Wohlleben).
There was so much more that I experienced in the two days I spent in Troy including eight wonderfully curated sound installations plus the historically important installation by David Tutor, Rainforest IV constructed by students and overseen by Phil Edelstein and John Driscoll. Check out Keynote speaker Cathy van Eck’s dedicated website for her book, Between Air and Electricity for a comprehensive list of sonic art composers.