PART 1 - WORDS WORDS WORDS

I thought about a mechanism for randomly triggering the words and this got me thinking about a project I saw ages ago called Skate by Janek Schaefer.

https://www.audioh.com/releases/skatelp.html

Basically a self cut record that has no tracking so the needle jumps about. I thought a large, slowly spinning disc could have the same principle but using triggers.

I’m thinking multiple arms could move sensors into place over the slow moving disc.  Imagine a record deck with many arms, which weirdly enough is also a Janek Schaefer idea, though I think he nicked that from Christian Marclay or DJ spooky.  I’ve found these actuators that could do the job that are quite big and clunky, but cheap enough to be able to buy multiples of, that sound great (to my mechano-perv ears anyways).  Check this naff motion study I did to get a feel for it… running at about x100 speed. It was accidental but the arms look like pinball flippers …

And here’s the sound of the actuator that would move the arms in and out of play….

As each arm moves across the disc you get a ‘moving target’ combination of rotation, randomly placed triggers and sweeping motion of the arms that should create a highly unpredictable outcome….BUT because there are multiple sensors we can reduce the frequency of the words being triggered just but pulling back the arms, perhaps then increasing frequency as the composition grows.  Controlled chaos.

You mentioned something about using tape, maybe having words on a big tape loop.  I built a tape loop machine before and though I love tape, handmade systems can be a bit of a nightmare in terms of reliability.   Coincidentally, I found this Wire cover image while googling that Janek Schaefer project…complex loops can look amazing and you can use weights as tensioners and create a kind of pulley system.

PART 2 - CHORAL

I got super excited about this concept but I have no idea if it will work.

So I was thinking about choral music and the church connotation and I thought about David Byrne and his ideas about the shape of music evolving to suit the environment it is played in.  In this theory choral music sounds the way it does (long, slowly sung passages…almost drone like) because that’s what sounded good / worked in the large European churches it evolved in.  This suits the huge reverb tails of these venues.

So reverb was the key here for me and I started thinking about building a special kind of spring reverb unit where the tension of the springs change.  I had this idea of it being a ‘breathing reverb’.  I’d need to use stepper motors to do this as the actuators in the previous video don’t have elegant enough motion.

I’m thinking there would be multiple springs (polyphonic reverb seems apt for choral) and mechanisms to give it a kind of plant like motion (growing and shrinking sort of thing).  Parts of the composition would be fed through it (possibly…. as it could sound shit) and this should add unusual artefacts to the sound depending on compression or rarefaction of the springs, plus the standard beauty of reverb you would expect. I haven’t found the time to render a 3D image out but I could maybe sketch (with an actual pencil) a rough shape out while on the train to London.

Here’s a video to help visualise…

PART 3 - SIREN

This is a tricky one because I think it’s important that something occurs indoors at the same time as the siren to signify that the siren is actually happening, but as we discussed…no sound.

So effectively a silent siren….which I quite like as a concept.

So I’m wondering if it would be enough to just build an air raid siren without the mechanism that makes the sound….which seems to be basically rotating discs with fins on them.

So that looks to me literally like a bench grinder…cue another home movie…not exactly silent but conceptually people might ‘get it’.

I also really like the look of this hand cranked one.

I keep getting pulled back to the idea of a rotating speaker too as even if no sound comes out it feels like / suggests you should be hearing something.

Infrasonics is another option - sound below the threshold of hearing.  Maybe part 3 is represented not by something that moves and not by something you hear, but just by something you feel.  In that case we’d need to spec a speaker with a very low frequency response and maybe build a custom case for it that looks the part.

There are devices called rotary woofers that use movable fan blades, rather than a speaker cone, to create sub 20Hz frequencies but that witchcraft might be a bit beyond me. Love the tweeters on this one…