In The Garden of Sonic Delights (2014)

Ever since I saw the youtube clip of water being manipulated by sound — “Amazing Sound and Water Experiment #2” — I have wanted to make a fountain that would flow backwards. Maybe it’s because I am interested in stories that have a peculiar relation to time and are animated by their opposites.

The Beginning of Memory

There’s a story in an ancient play about birds called “The Birds.” And it’s a short story from before the world began. From a time when there was no earth- no land. Only air and birds everywhere. Birds making huge patterns in the air. But the thing was there was no place to land. Because there was no land! So they just circled around and around. Because this was before the world began. And the seasons were running and the light was expanding. And the sound was deafening and light was rising and falling. And song birds were everywhere. Billions and billions of birds. And one of these birds was a lark and one day her father died. And this was a really big problem because what should they do with the body? And it was a big new question. There was no place to put the body because there was no earth. And it went on for five or six days and they were all trying to think of what to do with the body. And finally the lark had a solution. She decided to bury her father in the back of her own head. And this was the beginning of memory. Because before this no one could remember a thing. They were just constantly flying in circles. Constantly flying in huge circles.

In ‘05 I worked on Expo in Japan with the landscape designer Shirou M. Wakui who designed the royal gardens in Kyoto. Time has a unique function in his gardens and in the collaborations we did together for Expo. In the Kyoto Royal Gardens for example if you sat in one position for a whole year you would see the color yellow trace a time-lapsed path through the garden. In the early spring the path was made of bright forsythia, then yellow tulips. In the summer the path was continued into the middle distance and was made of yellow roses and in the fall the distant path was made of goldenrod and yellow maples.

We Fall Like Light is designed by a group of designers and builders who all made unique contributions to the fountain and the viewing device: my collaborator Bob Bielecki, and designer/fabricators Jim Keller, Jason Stern and Jim Cass.

—Laurie Anderson

Laurie Anderson is one of America’s most renowned — and daring — creative pioneers. She is best known for her multimedia presentations and innovative use of technology. As a writer, director, visual artist and vocalist she has created groundbreaking works that span the worlds of art, theater, and experimental music.

Her recording career, launched by O Superman in 1981, includes the soundtrack to her feature film Home of the Brave and Lifeon a String (2001). Anderson’s live shows range from simple spoken word to elaborate multimedia stage performances such as “Songs and Stories for Moby Dick” (1999). Anderson has published seven books and her visual work has been presented in major museums around the world.

In 2002, Anderson was appointed the first artist-in-residence of NASA which culminated in her 2004 touring solo performance “The End of the Moon.” Recent projects include a series of audiovisual installations and a high definition film, Hidden InsideMountains, created for World Expo 2005 in Aichi, Japan. In 2008 she completed a two-year worldwide tour of her performance piece, “Homeland,” which was released as an album on Nonesuch Records in June, 2010. Anderson’s solo performance “Delusion” debuted at the Vancouver Cultural Olympiad in February, 2010 and toured internationally throughout 2011. In 2010 a retrospective of her visual and installation work opened in São Paulo, Brazil and later traveled to Rio de Janeiro.

In 2011 her exhibition of all-new work titled “Forty-Nine Days In the Bardo” opened at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia. Her piece “Landfall,” a performance with the Kronos Quartet, debuted in February of 2013. She is currently artist-in-residence at CAP in UCLA in Los Angeles, and EMPAC in Troy, New York. Anderson lives in New York City.

Bob Bielecki

Bob Bielecki has worked in the media arts field for more than forty years, creating unique instruments and sound designs for installation and performance. He is known for his innovative use of technology to develop distinctive electronic effects and environments and is engaged in ongoing research in psychoacoustics, sound localization, and 3-D audio.Bob Bielecki has worked with many artists including John Cage, Alvin Lucier, La Monte Young and Pauline Oliveros. His association with Laurie Anderson dates from the mid-1970s and he has worked with Stephen Vitiello and Annea Lockwood since the 1980s.

He produced and engineered the groundbreaking media-arts residency program, ZBS/AIR, and helped to pioneer the field of binaural radio. A recipient of grants from the Andy Warhol Foundation and the New York State Council on the Arts, he is an Associate Professor of Music at Bard College and serves on the faculty of the Bard MFA Program.

Sunken Gardens is a performative audio installation, in which a new layer of sound — a sonic underwater world full of bubbling noises,  creaky technology, sonar sounds, oddly vibrating chords, surprising fragments of text, and so on — is added to the existing landscape. These sounds will be inaudible to the naked ear, but visitors, with the help of special receivers amplifying this sound field, will be able to sonically navigate this invisible landscape, creating their own musical form by walking amidst the many musical elements which make up its sonic and geographical structure. Like a piece of music, Sunken Gardens will contain fragments of narrative and harmonic structure; unlike traditional music,  visitors will play the piece non-linearly simply by walking through it.

The technology for Sunken Gardens — ‘induction loops’ or ‘hearing loops,’ as they are more popularly called — is decades old,  but is regaining popularity because it’s so helpful for those with hearing loss. Most hearing aids (and the receivers visitors will use) are equipped with telecoils, which amplify the electromagnetic waves given off by the induction loops, and enable the listener to hear concerts, lectures and in this case, an invisible sunken garden.

Betsey Biggs is a composer and interdisciplinary artist whose work in music, sound, video, and installation aims to expose the beautiful in the everyday, to actively engage the audience, and to transform place into creative interface through psychogeographic practice. The NewYorker’s Alex Ross has described her work as “psychologically complex, exposing how we orient ourselves with our ears.” She received her Ph.D. in Music Composition at Princeton University, writing about public sound art, held a postdoctoral fellowship at Brown University, and is currently a Sawyer Fellow at Harvard University.

By observing the way instruments, architecture, and ensemble performances interface, Catenary is both a stand-alone installation and a framework for performance. Using tuned and stretched piano wire on a massive environmental scale, it pushes the notion of an instrument towards architecture. The scale ruptures conventional structure and allows multiple vantage points of the piece. Viewers experience unique readings of the installation as they move around it.

The score is cut into the front panel of the boxes, juxtaposing instrumental and environmental design with musical notation. The boxes are patterned with coded notation, presented in the form of irregular but gridded dots. These circular marks are the score for the mechanical piece, which is transferred into code and struck by the motors. Doubling as a speaker grating, the incised patterns create a distinct relationship between image and sound. The amplified sound is directed physically through the patterns. The score produces the sound, which then exits through the score — layering sound production and sound notation.

The piece is anchored into the ground with rectangular concrete supports bolted to poles, which are raised over nine feet in the air. Dozens of wires span over hundreds of feet and across multiple trees and mounting points. The internal structure of the piece is built with a piano pin block made of laminated maple. Piano wire is tensioned by tuning pins and is struck by a motorized system with padded felts housed inside the metal boxes. The rhythmic divisions notated on each box sonically overlap, creating endless connections and levels of rhythmic patterns –mirroring both the visual design and the nature of the work itself.

Born in Brookline, Massachusetts, and currently based in New York City, Eli Keszler began playing drums at eight, and composing at twelve. He played in rock and hardcore bands, and his work retains an intense physicality and churning, often ferocious energy. Keszler’s installations and visual work employ piano wires of varying lengths which are struck, scraped, and vibrated by microprocessor-controlled motors. These installations are heard on their own and with accompanying ensemble scores, or solo performance, with Keszler’s aggressive, jarringly rhythmic, and propulsive drumming. His most recent project used 16 wires ranging from 100 to 800 feet long which were mounted off of the Manhattan Bridge. In an NPR All Songs Considered interview he said, “I like to work with raw material, simple sounds, primitive or very old sounds; sounds that won’t get dated in any way.” Often his work will appear accompanied by scores, drawings, and writings. A large body of his diagrams, screen prints, and detailed drawings was recently compiled in a collection ‘NEUM’ which accompanied his installation at the South London Gallery.

His installations and visual work have appeared at the Victoria & Albert Museum, South London Gallery, Tectonics Festival (Harpa Hall) Reykjavik, Centraal Museum in Utrecht, LUMA Foundation (Zurich), Boston Center for the Arts, and Barbican — St. Luke’s, amongst other places.

Keszler has toured extensively throughout Europe and the U.S., performing solo and in collaboration with artists such as Christian Wolff, Phill Niblock, Tony Conrad, Oren Ambarchi, Joe McPhee, Jandek, Roscoe Mitchell, Anthony Coleman, T Model Ford, Ran Blake, and Ilan Volkov with the Icelandic Symphony Orchestra. He has performed at venues including Muziekgebouw (Amsterdam), Barbican, ICA Boston, and Moma PS1 and has recorded solo releases for several labels. He has received commissions and awards from MATA, Gaudeamus, and String Orchestra of Brooklyn, and funding from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and is also a Meet the Composer Grant recipient. Eli Keszler is a graduate of the New England Conservatory of Music.

A site-specific installation that transforms a vast, windowless, abandoned warehouse on the Peekskill, New York waterfront into a sanctuary of light and sound. In the middle of a pitch-dark 10,000 square-foot space, there is an oasis of couches, pillows and rugs. Spiraling out from the oasis in concentric circles stretching across the entire space are instruments from a Balinese Gamelan orchestra retrofitted with mechanical mallets mounted to the ceiling trusses. Twenty four bronze kettle-shaped gongs called Reyong and Trompong, four hanging gongs ranging in size from 23 to 35 inches in diameter, four pairs of nine-inch bronze hand cymbals (Kopyak), and two dragon turtles with eight four-inch hand cymbals (Ceng-Ceng) robotically play day-long sequences of music composed specifically to allow the entire warehouse to function as a resonating chamber. With each sound, a pulsation of light bursts from the instrument and fades as the tone diminishes, briefly illuminating a spot in the vastness. Movements of music become a choreographed panoramic dance of light.

Suara Sinar is a refuge, it is a universe unto itself; it is an offering, a respite, an escape and a confrontation.

— Aaron Taylor Kuffner

The Gamelatron Project is the marriage of Indonesian sonic and ritual tradition with modern robotics. A Gamelatron is a sound-producing kinetic sculpture featuring instruments from Balinese and Javanese gamelan orchestras, retrofitted with mechanical mallets on sculptural mounts strategically arranged into standalone artworks and immersive installations. MIDI sequences control up to 100 robotic striking mechanisms that produce intricately woven melodic and rhythmic sound. The Gamelatron Project’s mission is to innovatively bring the legacy and creative cultural power of gamelan to new shores, new people and communities, and create a context for it to become a resource for people’s lives. Learn more at gamelatron.com

Aaron Taylor Kuffner, Co-Creator and Artistic Director of The Gamelatron Project, is a conceptual artist, sculptor, and composer. His pieces often take the form of longterm multi-year projects that involve in-depth research, collaboration with field experts, and development of specialized skill sets. Each project is uniquely attached to the idea of providing conceptual tools that further the evolution of consciousness through experiences of beauty and the sublime. In doing so he reaches far outside of conventions, pushing the role of art to be a form of service to society. Through his work Kuffner has become a noted composer, kinetic sculptor, electronic music maverick, a machinist, installation artist, ad-hoc engineer, and an ambassador of Indonesian culture. He has performed or presented work more than 400 times in 19 countries in the last 15 years. Learn more at aarontaylorkuffner.com

Site: 150 North Water Street, Peekskill, NY
Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art

of the Rosens’ house—the room itself—witnessed many an evening of music being executed in it by Walter Rosen (piano) and Lucie Bigelow Rosen (theremin) themselves. The [Music] Room—the sound installation piece—manifests as an apparently imminent state of eternal quasi-presence. The performers and the audience have already left the room. The involuntary sonic presence of both the instruments and of those who attended the concert, however, refuses to leave. It will resonate forever within these confines as a quasi-music that somehow surpasses the original; with its own self-sufficient presence, beauty, and pride. Or, seen in a different light: that “original” situation of performers and audience is probably being reenacted now — in front of us — in a parallel realm of which we can only sense its most alluring aspect: the noise in the music.

The automatic piano performs compositions taken from Walter Rosen’s preferred classical repertoire. The theremin performing sounds have been evolved from original recordings by Lucie Bigelow Rosen on the theremin.

— Francisco López

Francisco López is internationally recognized as one of the major figures of the sound art and experimental music scene. For more than thirty years he has developed an astonishing sonic universe, absolutely personal and iconoclastic, based on a profound listening of the world: destroying boundaries between industrial sounds and wilderness sound environments, shifting with passion from the limits of perception to the most dreadful abyss of sonic power, proposing a blind, profound and transcendental listening, freed from the imperatives of knowledge and open to sensory and spiritual expansion.

He has realized hundreds of concerts, projects with field recordings, workshops and sound installations in over seventy countries on the five continents. His extensive catalog of sound pieces (with live and studio collaborations with over 150 international artists) has been released by more than 300 record labels / publishers worldwide. He has been awarded honorary mentions at the competition of Ars Electronica Festival four times and is the recipient of the Qwartz Award 2010 for best sound anthology.

Diacousticon is, at one level, a system for machine listening and improvisational performance. Equipped with a full complement of microphones, loudspeakers, and simple robotic musical instruments, distributed in 360 degrees around the dovecote atop Caramoor’s Sense Circle fountain, Diacousticon is capable of both listening to its surroundings and generating sonic responses to what it hears.

Diacousticon is also a platform for experimentation. Several different algorithms will be deployed to govern its decisions and behaviors, which will range from the poetic to the animalistic, from lyrical to game-like, and from subtle to frantic. Each of these algorithms is, in essence, a composition that becomes realized in the interaction between the piece and its surroundings, according to the rules adopted. Information about the results of each algorithm will be collected over the course of the exhibition and periodically used to enact further refinements.
Finally, Diacousticon takes into account a post-Edward Snowden reality, which must embrace the interchangeability of “interaction” and “surveillance.” We can no longer assume that the actions of any technological system — even an artwork — that is listening and attempting to comprehend its surroundings are benign. Aspects of Diacousticon’s behavior may emerge which call into question its purpose and its relationship to its environment.

— Stephan Moore

Sound artist Stephan Moore has been working at the forefront of the contemporary experimental audioworld for the past 15 years as a curator, improviser, composer, programmer, theatrical sound designer, loudspeaker builder, radio technician, installation artist, live sound engineer, and teacher. Based in Providence, RI, he is a Ph.D. candidate at Brown University in the Multimedia and Electronic Music Experiments program. He is presently the vice-president of the American Society for Acoustic Ecology.

His creative work currently manifests as electronic studio compositions, improvised solo performances, sound installation works, sound designs and scores for modern dance and theater performances, audio software, and the design of multi-channel sound systems for unusual circumstances. He develops his own performance software and builds Hemisphere loudspeakers for use in his own performances and sound installation work, which he also makes available through his company Isobel Audio. Significant ongoing collaborations include the Xenolinguistics performance project with visionary video artist Diana Reed Slattery, numerous scores and designs for the choreographer Yanira Castro, sound and technical design for the Nerve Tank theater collective, and the electronic music duo Evidence with sound artist Scott Smallwood.

From 2006 to 2012 he served as a curator of ISSUE Project Room in Brooklyn and as a founding member of their artistic advisory board. Most notably, he curated the month-long Floating Points Festivals there from 2006 to 2010, which made use of a large array of his Hemisphere speakers. His other curatorial activities have included the 2010 Mixology Festival at Roulette Intermedium and the Experiments in the Studio concert series at the Merce Cunningham Studios (2007–2009).

From 2004 to 2010 Moore was the Music Coordinator of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, where he worked and often performed with composers such as Gavin Bryars, John Paul Jones, Sigur Ros, Sonic Youth, Christian Wolff, David Behrman, Annea Lockwood, John King, Emanuel Pimenta, Mikel Rouse, and Takehisa Kosugi to realize full productions of their scores. He also oversaw the performances of several works by John Cage, David Tudor, Brian Eno, Radiohead, and others. In 2010 he collaborated with Animal Collective to create Transverse Temporal Gyrus, a 40-channel sound installation at the Guggenheim Museum with visual elements by Danny Perez. He later created both a downloadable version of the piece, which is algorithmically generated at each playing, and artwork for the limited-edition vinyl release. Other recent notable projects include: audio programming for artist Anthony McCall’s Traveling Wave; a tool for flexible sound distribution for artist Toni Dove’s Lucid Possession; and technical consultation for the organizations EarFilms, Tellart, and Boston’s Constellation Center.

A group of Pleasantville High School students at the Jacob Burns Film Center’s Media Arts Lab have collaborated with John Morton and Adam Rokhsar to design and install Usonia in Nonna Square, a small urban green in downtown Pleasantville, NY adjoining the train station. The interactive installation focuses on the sonic placement and manipulation of field recordings, film clip audio, and interviews made in Pleasantville to create a “visionless cinema”— sonic events describing a narrative that is heard but not seen, and contrasting with the visual activity passing in front of listeners in the park. The installation is activated by two handcranked music boxes mounted on a metal pedestal and surrounded by four speakers. Each music box, run by visitors to the installation, controls a different aspect of the sonic mix.

“Usonia,” a term first coined by writer James Duff Law in 1865, refers to his notion of a more inclusive United States and recognizes the growing country’s broad cultural backgrounds. In 1945, Frank Lloyd Wright participated in the creation of Usonian Homes, a neighborhood adjacent to Pleasantville, based on Wright’s ideas of community and landscape integration.

The collaborative process in creating this installation has evolved over many months of discussions, workshops, and experiments, culminating in a “pop-up” installation. A careful balance of directed activities and an expanding awareness of sonic details and interplay have encouraged a sense of ownership in the students.

Usonia has been created by John Morton, composer, in collaboration with Adam Rokhsar, Dylan Franks, Kate O’Brien, Jack Butler, and Jacob Nemec.

As a composer, instrument builder, and sound installation artist, John Morton has presented his music throughout the United States, and has participated in collaborations at The Kitchen, The Playwright’s Center, and at the Kohler Arts/Industry Program. His CD, Outlier: New Music for Music Boxes, was the subject of a feature and live performance on National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition Sunday (“Music Box Man”), and he received NYFA Fellowships in 2002 and 2006. In 2010, he was a fellow at the Bellagio Study Center in Italy and was in residence at the Bogliasco Foundation in Genoa, Italy in October 2011. He was awarded a McKnight Visiting Composer Fellowship, where he explored the compositional and sculptural possibilities of abandoned farm equipment in western Minnesota.

For the last 12 years, Morton has been composing with music boxes by altering the internal mechanisms and overlapping multiple music boxes simultaneously. Working with simple tools, he frees up the music box’s inner works, expanding the variety of available sounds and thus generates a method for the continual layering and variation of musical material. The repetitive nature of music boxes and their ability to evoke musical associations are employed, and, through the use of digital technology, the music box sound is directly merged into the compositional process. These works have led to the creation of sound installations that embrace the randomization of sonic choices and utilize site-specific sounds and other mechanical music-making devices.

In 2009, “Central Park Sound Tunnel,” Morton’s six-channel sound project, was installed in a pedestrian tunnel north of the Central Park Zoo (featured in The New York Times article “Sound Tunnel: Avant-Garde Park Portrait” by Randy Kennedy), and he collaborated on a music box sound installation with sculptor Jackie Shatz based on Darwin’s writings for Glyndor Gallery at Wave Hill. “WaterWall,” a sound installation on Governors Island in collaboration with Jackie Shatz, was exhibited during the summer of 2011. He recently completed a commission for the Adirondack Museum, “Sonic Hotel — Lost and Found Sounds of the Adirondacks,” an 18-channel sound installation situated in a former log hotel on the museum campus. He also collaborated recently with composer David Simons on a motion-activated installation for “The Art of Video Games” at the Hudson River Museum.

is a sonic treasure hunt of bells and sounds and acoustical ecosystems that together reveal the rhythms of life that make up the farm. The central experience is the “Bell Tower” where the Titanium nosecone of a solid fuel rocket from the 1950s is suspended in a 60-foot stone silo. It hangs in dynamic tension with the randomly oscillating movements of a heavy steel mallet, which strikes the titanium “bell” at unpredictable time intervals, causing the whole acoustic of the silo space to resonate for up to three minutes. The reverberation of this extraordinary object as it vibrates the column of air within the stone silo is a magnificent treat for the ears and the whole body.

From this central ear awakening, visitors can go on a sonic treasure hunt throughout the Stone Barns’ beautiful grounds to find other bells and systems of bells that reveal the complex interplay of rhythms and activities of the farm: bells rung in response to wind, water, sunlight, animals, and insects. Each experience reveals a rhythm, an acoustic space, and sonic information about the complex functioning systems of the farm.

Bruce Odland is an artist who thinks with his ears. A pioneer in sound installations, his first public sound installation, “Sun Song,” broadcast a four-channel cloud of reverberant sound over an outdoor festival in Denver from the clock tower of East High, back in 1977. Since then, he has discovered resonance and beauty in the fractal music of nature, and in transforming vast industrial soundscapes of the cities into harmonic music. In 1987 he founded O+A with Austrian sound pioneer Sam Auinger. Together they have developed a hearing perspective of the culture we live in, and they have responded with installations that change the perception of public space. “Blue Moon” (2004) re-tuned the post 9/11 soundspace of the World Financial Center plaza by turning noise into harmony mixed by the tides and moon. “Requiem for Fossil Fuels” (2007-2010) brought together four virtuoso voices, the Latin Requiem Mass, and an eight-channel orchestra of tuned city resonances. “Sonic Vista” (2010), a permanent piece, united the north and south GreenBelts of Frankfurt, Germany at a new focal point of listening: a “tuned” railroad bridge crossing the Main river. “Harmonic Bridge” (1998) for MASS MoCA, reclaims an underutilized city space with harmonic resonances. Their latest collaboration is a permanent installation: “Hearing View” (2013), which contains a library of healing sounds for the Rheinau Psychiatric Clinic — the oldest psychiatric institution in Switzerland.

Over the years, Odland has lent his ears to many collaborative projects in film, dance, museum installation and theatre with artists such as Laurie Anderson, JoAnne Akalaitis, Wallace Shawn, Andre Gregory, Peter Erskine, The Wooster Group, Tony Oursler, Dan Graham, Robert Woodruff, Dave Davidson, Bill Morrison, Stacey Steers, and Ron Miles. He recently co-directed a major outdoor sound installation with Laurie Anderson for Novartis in Basel, Switzerland. Currently he is founding the TANK, a center for sonic arts and experimentation in a giant abandoned water tank in the high desert of Western Colorado.

Bruce Odland’s Seven Bells for Stone Barns was created with master of mechanical interaction Bill Ballou.

is a large-scale, site-specific sound installation developed for the Greenhouse at the Lyndhurst Estate in Tarrytown, New York. Built in 1881, it is one of the earliest iron-frame greenhouses in North America and, at 376 feet long, one of the largest of its time. It ceased operation in the 1940s and today is maintained in a skeleton form without glass panes to enclose the interior spaces.

The piece consists of a generative sound composition built from field recordings and electronic tones, which are played through a set of thirty loudspeakers spread irregularly throughout the Greenhouse structure. The work is based around the concept of a line transect, or the path along which an observer counts and records occurrences of the phenomena of study (e.g. plants). This very specific, attentive mode of moving through space provides a model for visitor engagement with the piece and the site. The title comes from the name of the central area of the Greenhouse, a section were palm trees were cultivated. The sound composition is based on linear mapping of both the Greenhouse structure and elements of the surrounding estate. The shapes of these lines and the spacing of elements found along them are used as the underlying framework for the piece.

The movement of sound in the space is articulated visually by a set of brightly colored line cables that run from point to point among the speakers and between key structural elements of the greenhouse. These outline the paths and trajectories of the sonic material and illustrate the idea of a transect as it functions within the site.

Several live performances are scheduled to take place within the piece, and these will activate the site in specific ways throughout the five-month exhibition. The performances feature a rotating cast of sound artists and musicians, and they will interpret the composition and score in distinctive and idiosyncratic ways.

Ed Osborn works with many forms of electronic media including installation, video, sound, and performance. His pieces feature a tactile sense of space, movement, image, and aurality combined with a precise economy of materials. Osborn has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Creative Work Fund and Arts International, and been awarded residencies from the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program, the Banff Centre for the Arts, Het Apollohuis (Eindhoven, Netherlands), STEIM (Amsterdam), and EMPAC (Troy, NY).

He has presented his work at SFMOMA (San Francisco, CA), the singuhr- hörgalerie (Berlin, Germany), the Berkeley Art Museum (Berkeley, CA), Artspace (Sydney, Australia), the Institute of Modern Art (Brisbane, Australia), ZKM (Karlsruhe, Germany), Kiasma (Helsinki, Finland), Mass- MOCA (North Adams, MA), the Yale University Art Gallery (New Haven, CT), and the Sonic Arts Research Centre (Belfast, Northern Ireland).

He has taught at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), the California College of Arts (Oakland, CA), and the University of California at Santa Cruz (Santa Cruz, CA). He is on the faculty of the Visual Arts Department at Brown University (Providence, RI), specializing in teaching sound and electronic media.

is a site-specific sound installation consisting of a multi-voiced generative composition based on solar-powered sound-making devices. There are twelve voices distributed in a grassy area, all of which are completely reliant on the sun for making sound. The eight smaller voices “wake up” very early, and are capable of making sounds at very low light levels, and will drastically change their song based on the amount of sunlight present. An additional set of four instruments, arranged in a circular orientation, activate only in direct sunlight. These will play a generative composition of melodic patterns based upon an equal-tempered pentatonic scale in the “3500 Hz” system, which will change throughout the day in response to the length of time they have been individually activated, as well as the general ambient light level. Every ten minutes, the four voices will “chime,” coming together and playing a short piece in sync/harmony with each other, before going back to their individual characteristics.

The title is derived from the 3500 Hz “halo” that will pervade the sound of the space, acting as a kind of reverse fundamental pitch. The subtitle is an homage to Lucie Rosen, who, with her husband Walter, founded the Caramoor estate. In addition to her legacy of bringing great music to Caramoor, she was a renowned performer on the legendary electronic instrument, the theremin. Her curly blond hair was once described in the New York Evening Journal as a “wide halo around her delicate and ethereal face.”

Scott Smallwood is a sound artist, composer, and sound performer who creates works inspired by discovered textures and forms, through a practice of listening, field recording, and sonic improvisation. He also designs experimental electronic instruments and software, as well as sound installations and site-specific performance scenarios. Important to his process is exploring the subtleties of sonic texture through gradual transformations of timbre, particularly with sounds that may have originated from specific recordings of objects or spaces. His compositional and improvisational work makes use of space explicitly, and often involves multiple channel environments, found sounds, and non-conventional instrumentation. He has performed and collaborated with numerous artists, including Pauline Oliveros, John Butcher, Seth Cluett, Jennifer Mesch, Benton-C Bainbridge, and long-time collaborator Stephan Moore. His work has been published by Deep Listening, Static Caravan, Autumn Records, and Wowcool Records, among others. He has written for numerous instrumental ensembles, including recent works for the New York Virtuoso Singers, the Princeton Laptop Orchestra, and the Continuum Ensemble of Toronto. He has been active as an educator for over 20 years, and currently lives in Edmonton, Alberta, where he teaches composition, improvisation, and electroacoustic music at the University of Alberta.

is a composition that simulates the principles of echolocation, a system of listening that allows bats, and other animals, to navigate. Listening Is As Listening Does is a dynamic sound work, composed to project a sound and listen for the echoed response. The piece emerges as information from echoes is mined, the data from which contributes to new compositional choices.

Listening Is As Listening Does asks how we listen and how we respond to listening, and posits what a performance of listening might sound like. It also positions the listener as a variable within the piece, as their presence will affect the reflections of sound amidst the architecture, compelling the work to navigate new compositional terrain.

But why echolocation and why focus on bats? Bats are fascinating creatures, navigating the world with unique sensorial systems that beg exploration. However, the inspiration for Listening Is As Listening Does came from my first tour of Caramoor when I learned that the bats, long time inhabitants of Caramoor’s Spanish Courtyard, have been disappearing due to the spread of White Nose Syndrome. White Nose Syndrome is a disease that has, alarmingly, wiped out over five million bats in the Northeast. Caramoor’s caretakers miss the night creatures for several reasons, including their voracious appetite for mosquitos and pollination capabilities. For Caramoor, and those of us intrigued by their strikingly poetic behaviors, I invite you to ponder what we can learn from bats, as well as their place within our ecosystem.

— Suzanne Thorpe

Suzanne Thorpe is a musician/composer who works in a spectrum of modalities, fixed and improvised, installed and recorded. She plays electro-acoustic flute through an ever-evolving array of analog and digital effects, incorporating laptop upon whim. Her way is to listen for just-the-right sounds and timbres, and the appropriate moments to introduce them to each other.

Her composed works tend to be site-specific sound pieces that speak of, and with, their environment with an amalgam of sound sources, bringing forth moments of possibility and multiplicity. Her work has been shown and performed internationally, including All Tomorrow’s Parties (UK and U.S.), Roskilde (DK), The New Museum (NYC), Issue Project Room’s Floating Points Festival (NYC), Activating the Medium Festival (San Francisco), No Idea Festival (Austin), High Zero Festival (Baltimore), and exhibited at Klieo Gallery (NYC), Exit Art (NYC), Mills College (Oakland), California College of the Arts (Oakland) and more.

As an improviser she has enjoyed performing with Pauline Oliveros, Zeena Parkins, Gino Robair, Chris Brown, Zbigniew Karkowski, Anti-matter, Ulrich Krieger, Miguel Frasconi, Jenny Walsh, Miya Masaoka, Nate Wooley and Mazen Karbaj among others. She also has recurring collaborations with Philip White, Stephan Moore, and Bonnie Jones.

She has released over 20 recordings on labels such as Sony, V2, Beggars Banquet, Geffen, Specific Recordings, and Tape Drift, and was a founding member of critically acclaimed Mercury Rev, with whom she performed, recorded and toured from 1989–2001, earning a gold record for 1998’s Deserter’s Songs. She can more recently be heard on J Mascis’ solo record Several Shades of Why (Sub Pop) and Pauline Oliveros’ Primordial Lift (Lovely Records).

Ms. Thorpe has been the recipient of residencies and fellowships from Harvestworks Digital Media Foundation, Meet the Composer, and NYFA. She also was awarded the Frog Peak Collective Award for innovative research in the electronic music field. Currently, she is pursuing a Ph.D. in Music/Integrative Studies at University of California San Diego.

is a site – specific  interactive installation , activated  by visitors coming in close proximity. Six upright piano frameworks–  string/harp cast iron structure, including the soundboard–configured  in a house “look-alike,” are retained to be the essential components  of The Pianohouse. As visitors approach the structure it plays music,  accompanied by an array of kinetic electro-mechanical actuators which  strike, bow, pluck or scratch the strings.

Over time, The Pianohouse will musically “deconstruct” itself, as a  result of weather and other environmental conditions. The instruments will collectively experience these effects, slowly changing the pitch and other parameters. This metaphor plays very well into the philosophy and work of the late John Cage: prepared pianos are playing in an unpredictable fashion until the silence takes over.

This overall timeframe again is unpredictable. It could be several months or several years—only nature can affect this duration. A motion sensor activates different mechanical devices to play the designated compositions. Some compositions explore a more percussive path;  others are based more on a harmonic spectrum, to be played on the piano strings.

My work is an ongoing exploration of the concepts of sound, vision and movement, experimenting with combinations that will introduce our senses of perception to a totally new experience.  Although I use the latest technology available, I work with “natural” elements—water, air, light,  fire, etc.—and reconfigure them in new and unusual applications, pushing them to the limits of what we traditionally think of as their role.

Many of my commissions have supported my interest in these new genres—encouraging the development of original ideas and exploration of multi-disciplined mediums. In most projects,  I’ve had to develop my own components, because there was nothing commercially available that could be used for my particular expectation.

I am continually seeking new forms of expression, but often use methods that may actually be ancient in origin: a tuning system that may be a thousand years old, or a computer used to achieve acoustic, rather than synthesized, sound. It is these very contradictions which give my work an ambiguity that piques the imagination of viewers and continues to stimulate my own.

Almost a quarter century’s pursuit of discovery and application has taken place in my development of a body of work. Early experiences in art, music, and technical training, theater set design, and kinetic sculpture have served as subtext for each successive project. The balance between visual and aural in my work is not coincidental—I’m not content to create something which merely functions technically or is pleasing to the eye—it is the complexity of dimensions which offers the most satisfaction. The time-space concept, which can be expressed musically as well as visually, has been brought to the point where we can visualize sound. There is a threshold between the two where the cognition process of the viewer is likely to recognize acoustics and perceptual movement simultaneously — a natural phenomena.

This relatively new art form has begun to feel at home within the arts community but still holds enough uncharted territory to offer unlimited possibilities—a challenge that will undoubtedly keep me occupied for the next half of my life.
— Trimpin

Trimpin was born in 1951 in Germany and attended the University in Berlin. For the past 30 years he has been living and working as a sound artist in Seattle, Washington. Commissions, projects, and guest lecturer positions have been the primary focus of his profession as a sound artist. He has been a recipient of numerous grants and awards nationally and internationally.

is a site-specific sound piece  created for Caramoor’s Italian Pavilion. The Pavilion was inspired by  the Italian architect Filippo Brunnelleschi, one of the foremost architects  and engineers of the Italian Renaissance. The open-air building  is visually striking and includes many features designed to enhance its  beauty, as well as a number of practical features such as the arched floor  shaped to shed the rain. All of this is immediately visible, even from a  distance. However, the remarkable acoustics of this space are every bit  as striking as its appearance. Although invisible to the casual observer  (and probably accidental to the original design), these sonic qualities  have provided a unique opportunity to the composers.

The subtle variance in the dimensions of the space, due to the curve of the ceiling and the gentle contour of the floor, produces a myriad of resonances. Our composition is carefully tuned to the pitches suggested by these resonances. Measurements were taken and sounds chosen specifically to harmonize with these — the structure’s own preferred pitches. Synthetic tones slowly come and go, creating the underlying sound bed, over which a guitar—tuned to those same pitches—is played by the wind. When you enter the space, you’ll discover a highly localized acoustic experience.  The sweet spot follows you. Then,  when you step toward the perimeter of the space, all reverberation vanishes.

Step into the space and listen to sounds that have been held within the Pavilion since its creation.
— Stephen Vitiello and Bob Bielecki

Stephen Vitiello is an electronic musician and media artist. His sound installations have been presented internationally and are in the collections of museums including the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Lyon and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Past exhibitions include MASS MoCA, the 2002 Whitney Biennial, the 2006 Biennial of Sydney, the Cartier Foundation, Paris, and in public spaces including on the High Line in New York City. Vitiello has collaborated with such artists and musicians as Nam June Paik, Tony Oursler, Pauline Oliveros, Julie Mehretu, Taylor Deupree, and Ryuichi Sakamoto. Vitiello has received numerous awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship for Fine Arts, Creative Capital funding in the category of Emerging Fields, and an Alpert/Ucross Award for Music. Originally from New York, Vitiello is now based in Richmond, Virginia, where he is an Associate Professor in the department of Kinetic Imaging at Virginia Commonwealth University.

For over 20 years of performances, recordings and installations, Bob Bielecki has been a vital partner in many of Stephen Vitiello’s most ambitious projects.

Bob Bielecki has worked in the media arts field for more than forty years, creating unique instruments and sound designs for installation and performance. He is known for his innovative use of technology to develop distinctive electronic effects and environments and is engaged in ongoing research in psychoacoustics, sound localization, and 3-D audio.Bob Bielecki has worked with many artists including John Cage, Alvin Lucier, La Monte Young and Pauline Oliveros. His association with Laurie Anderson dates from the mid-1970s and he has worked with Stephen Vitiello and Annea Lockwood since the 1980s.

He produced and engineered the groundbreaking media-arts residency program, ZBS/AIR, and helped to pioneer the field of binaural radio. A recipient of grants from the Andy Warhol Foundation and the New York State Council on the Arts, he is an Associate Professor of Music at Bard College and serves on the faculty of the Bard MFA Program.

Annea Lockwood and Bob Bielecki

Wild Energy gives access to the inaudible, vibrations in the ultra and infra ranges emanating from sources which affect us fundamentally, but which are beyond our audio perception, many of which are creating our planet’s environment: the sun, the troposphere and ionosphere, the earth’s crust and core, the oxygen-generating trees — everything deeply integrated, forming an inaudible web in which we move, through which we live and on which, therefore, we depend. It is our sense that through these sounds one can feel the energies generated, not as concepts but as energy-fields moving through one’s body. A generating image for the piece is of Caramoor’s trees funneling these energies into the oxygen we breathe as we walk near them, or lie under them.

Wild Energy is a fifty minute loop which begins with solar oscillations recorded by the SOHO spacecraft, sped up 42,000 times, and ends with ultrasound recorded from the interior of a scots pine tree, slowed down 10 times, to make them audible to us. We are deeply grateful to the scientists who so generously gave us access to their sound files and permission to use them. The many sounds and their sources are described below, in order of initial appearance.

Solar oscillations

Solar oscillations are pressure waves which travel through the body of the sun, causing ripples on the surface which the SOHO spacecraft is recording (NASA and the European Space Agency). Alexander Kosovichev and colleagues at Stanford University’s Solar Oscillation Investigation program, sped up 40 days of solar data by a factor of 42,000, bringing them into the audio range.

Kilauea volcano – gas vents, tremors

Pressurized gas is released as magma rises to the surface, creating pressure fluctuations, infrasound. Gas bubbles contribute to the sounds produced, which can resonate cavities beneath the surface. Infrasound signals recorded from tremors, explosions, fissure eruptions and bench collapses have been recorded by Milton Garces and his team (the Infrasound Laboratory, the University of Hawai’i) in recent years, particularly at the Pu’u O’o and Halema’uma’u vents. Of the recordings we have used here most have been sped up 200 times, a few 100 times.

Chorus waves and whistlers

Very Low Frequency Chorus Waves are electromagnetic waves caused by intense plasma waves generated in the radioactive Van Allen Belts in the magnetosphere surrounding the Earth. Whistlers (also VLF electromagnetic waves) are generated by lightning and move along Earth’s magnetic field lines, between the two hemispheres. Their high frequency components travel more rapidly than their lower frequencies, creating a falling tone. “This is what the radiation belts would sound like if we had antennas for ears” commented Craig Kletzing of the University of Iowa’s Radio & Plasma Wave Group who gave us these recordings and also a recording of AKR emissions. NASA’s two Radiation Belt Storm Probe satellites, together with the University’s EMFISIS receivers recently sent back recordings transmitted in stereo, a new development enriching both the sound and the data picture. Both whistlers and choruses occur at frequencies within our hearing range, and are audible once converted by the receivers.

Watch ScienceCasts: The Sound of Earthsong

Sei whale

Sei whales are “the third largest baleen whale, found in subtropical, temperate and subpolar waters worldwide.” (DOSITS) Having been extensively hunted they are now an endangered species, with an estimated current population of 80,000 whales. This whale was recorded by Arthur Newhall (the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution), near the continental shelf break east of New Jersey, just south of the Hudson Canyon.

Dr. Newhall has posted this recording on the University of Rhode Island’s DOSITS (Discovery of Sound in the Sea) website where many interesting oceanographic sound samples may be heard.

Earthquakes

The ground shaking of earthquakes is very low frequency, recorded as seismograms which may be sped up to bring them into the hearing range. Arrays of seismometers are used at different distances from the epicenter, which affects the pitch ranges, in addition to the quake’s perceived strength: Because high frequencies lose energy and are dissipated faster with distance than low frequencies, higher pitches and sharp, explosive events indicate a shorter distance from the seismometers, and the deep rumbling ones a greater distance.

The first quake in the installation was the Parkfield quake of 2004 (on the San Andreas Fault), recorded by the USGS. The subsequent quake recordings were given to us by Ben Holtzman, at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University and Jason Candler (www.seismicsoundlab.org): Sumatra 2002, and the Sumatra-Andaman Island great quake of 2004, Japan 2007, and also from Japan 2011 – the ‘tsunami’ quake.

Sounds of SeismologyBroadcasts of continuous seismic sound from real-time global quake data

Trees: ultrasound emissions 1

Trees continuously pump water out of the ground through water columns in the xylem layer up to the leaves, enabling photosynthesis to take place. When trees become water-stressed, in drought or other dry conditions, unusually high levels of  tension in the water columns lead to their rupture. Air bubbles are formed, blocking water flow and bursting; one indication of this is the ultrasonic acoustic cavitation clicks the trees emit. Biophysicist and tree physiologist, Melvin Tyree, has carried out pioneering research on this and other aspects of water transport in trees and compiled this sequence of cavitation clicks, each distinct and individual, which he sent to Annea over a decade ago. Here is an illustration of the process.

Hydrothermal Vents

These oceanic vents form when seawater (35.6 degrees F) penetrates cracks in the  seabed, moving down toward magma bodies where it absorbs intense heat and minerals. The now superheated water (up to 860 degrees F), which is rich in hydrogen sulfide and minerals, then bursts back up through the seafloor and into the ocean to complete the hydrothermal cycle. The hottest of these vents are called black smokers (named for the black plumes they produce).

Long thought to be silent, hydrophone arrays deployed near the vents have recently revealed that they generate intense broadband acoustic signals at frequencies from 5 to 500Hz, and also “narrowband tones from 10 – 250Hz… Each vent has a unique acoustic signature” (dosits.org). Timothy Crone and colleagues at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory have been recording at the Sully and Puffer black smoker vents in the Main Endeavor Field of the Juan de Fuca Ridge, two hundred miles off the coast of Washington State and gave us filtered examples of the tones generated as the vents’ physical structures resonate.

Listen to the Sound of Black Smoker Vents

Bats

The echolocation calls bats emit are in the ultrasound range, so these have been slowed down. The following bats (found on Shockwave-Sound.com) are included in Wild Energy:

Pipistrelle bat – we do not have identification for the precise type.

California Myotis bat – prefers desert habitat, known for the great agility of its flight patterns.

Silver-haired bat – the largest of New York’s bats with a wingspan which can reach 16 inches, found largely in the Adirondacks.

Big brown bat – the largest cave bat in New York State with a wingspan of almost 13 inches, and is the most commonly seen summer bat.

Big brown bat hunting tiger moth: This remarkable recording by Aaron Corcoran of Wake Forest University is of a big brown trying to catch a Grote’s tiger moth (Bertholdia trigona) using echolocation. The moth, in turn, is using ultrasound bursts to jam the bat’s echolocation capability – i.e. interference. The recording has been slowed down ten times to bring it into our hearing range.

AKR waves

Auroral kilometric radiation emissions occur along magnetic field lines, and are generated by high-energy particles shooting through Earth’s magnetic field. They are associated with aurora displays, and seem to occur “about 3,000 miles above bright regions” in the auroras which arise in polar regions, University of Iowa researchers Robert Mutel and Donald Gurnett noted in 2001.

Tree ultrasound emissions 2: Scots Pine

Cavitation clicks are not the only ultrasonic acoustic emissions (UAE) from trees. Roman Zweifel, Fabienne Zeugin (Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research WSL) and Marcus Maeder (Institute for Computer Music and Sound Technology, Zurich) have been recording a variety of other emissions from within scots pines, discovering a relationship between the intensity of the emissions and changes in stem radius, for example. This recording, made by Marcus Maeder in 2012, together with an earthquake in Sumatra (recorded in 2004 by Ben Holtzman), can be heard at the end of Wild Energy. 

Photo by Nicole Tavenner

Annea Lockwood

Artist Website

Born in New Zealand in 1939 and living in the US since 1973, Annea Lockwood is known for her explorations of the rich world of natural acoustic sounds and environments, in works ranging from sound art and installations, through text-sound and performance art to concert music. Her music has been performed in many venues and festivals including: the Possibility of Action exhibition at MACBA Barcelona, De Ijsbreker, the Other Minds Festival-San Francisco, the Walker Art Center, the American Century: 1950 – 2000 exhibition at the Whitney Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum, Queen Elizabeth Hall, the Westdeutscher Rundfunk, CNMAT Berkeley, the Asia-Pacific Festival, Donaufest 2006 Ulm, the Donau Festival Krems, the 7th Totally Huge New Music Festival Perth, Ear To The Earth Festival — New York and Sonic Acts XIII.

Her sound installation, A Sound Map of the Danube, has been presented in Germany, Austria, and the USA. This is a surround ‘sound map’ of the entire Danube River, incorporating a wide variety of water, animal and underwater insect sounds, rocks from the riverbed, and the voices of those whose lives are intimately connected to the river. Other recent projects include Ceci n’est pas un piano, for piano, video, and electronics commissioned by Jennifer Hymer; Jitterbug, commissioned by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, a six-channel soundscape with two improvising musicians; and In Our Name, a collaboration with Thomas Buckner based on poems by prisoners in Guantánamo. She was a recipient of the 2007 Henry Cowell Award. Her music has been issued on CD and online on the Lovely Music, Ambitus, EM, XI, Rattle, Lorelt, and Pogus labels.

Photo by Marcella Robinson

Bob Bielecki

Bob Bielecki has worked in the media arts field for more than forty years, creating unique instruments and sound designs for installation and performance. He is known for his innovative use of technology to develop distinctive electronic effects and environments and is engaged in ongoing research in psychoacoustics, sound localization, and 3-D audio.

Bob Bielecki has worked with many artists including John Cage, Alvin Lucier, La Monte Young and Pauline Oliveros. His association with Laurie Anderson dates from the mid-1970s and he has worked with Stephen Vitiello and Annea Lockwood since the 1980s.

He produced and engineered the groundbreaking media-arts residency program, ZBS/AIR, and helped to pioneer the field of binaural radio. A recipient of grants from the Andy Warhol Foundation and the New York State Council on the Arts, he is an Associate Professor of Music at Bard College and serves on the faculty of the Bard MFA Program.

Ranjit Bhatnagar

Created for 2014’s In the Garden of Sonic Delights, Stone Song by Ranjit Bhatnagar was originally hosted by the Neuberger Museum of Art of Purchase College, SUNY and was brought to Caramoor in 2015.

“When I look at an old stone wall, I think about how the seemingly solid form has shifted and settled over time, through weathering and the erosion and compression of the soil. In order to explore this process through sound, Stone Song is laced with pressure sensors and strain gauges, and sensors for humidity, temperature, and barometric pressure. All this information feeds into a drone synthesizer, whose fundamental tones shift slowly over the months as the stones settle. Daily weather and seasonal changes will produce smaller, shorter-term changes in the stones’ song, as will the weight of visitors who stop to sit on it and listen.

“I’ve designed Stone Song in collaboration with Hilary Martin, Akira Inman, and Evan Oxland.”

— Ranjit Bhatnagar

Photo by Keira Heu-Jwyn Chang

Ranjit Bhatnagar

Artist Website

Ranjit Bhatnagar discovered sound art around age 14, listening to weird late night programs on KPFA. He now works with interactive and sound installations, with scanner photography, and with internet-based collaborative art. Recent works have been exhibited at the Lawrence Hall of Science in Berkeley, the Parc d’aventures scientifiques in Belgium, Flux Factory in Queens, in the Artbots series at Eyebeam Atelier and the Pratt Institute in New York, and the Mermaid Show at the Williamsburg Art and Historical Center in Brooklyn. He recently taught “Mister Resistor” at Parsons School of Design, a studio course and rock band with homemade instruments.

Originally from the San Francisco Bay Area, Ranjit received a BA from U.C. Berkeley and an MS from the University of Pennsylvania, and was certified carnie trash by the Coney Island Sideshow School in 2002. He lives in Brooklyn next to a nice big park.