"Lyd går i stillhet"
The work I am proposing for the workshop-in-exposition addresses two main questions: What type of sounds are silences? – and, What types of relationships may form between these silences? And, I do indeed mean silences as plural nouns.
The name of the piece is "Lyd går i stillhet". In English the literal translation is "Sound walks in silence", but in Norwegian it can also mean "Sound goes into silence".
What it is and what it does
The object to be presented is a round sculpture – a machine – that hangs from the ceiling by three ropes. On the underside of the machine there is a hole for the listener to puts her/his head into.
Inside the machine there is a small dark chamber, shaped in a circle, approximately 80 cm in diameter. Inside the walls of the chamber there are eight equidistant loudspeakers and two larger ones in the ceiling of the chamber.
It is an interactive audio sculpture that provides an enclosed space for the listener to experience an intimate immersive musical landscape. A machine that composes music automatically by feeding on the silences that its listeners produce while inside the chamber.
{function: proposal, keywords: [silence, sound, sculpture, loudspeaker, sound art]}
The machine's agential intention is to turn your silences into music for you to listen to.
Does it merely play the music for its own enjoyment? No, the music stops when the listener leaves, and all residue from the listeners visits are deleted. Each musical composition is ephemeral and personal, it appears with listeners presence and disappears abruptly in the listeners absence. Moreover it only exists for the listener for that exact moment; the next visit by the same person will result in a different musical composition.
But the algorithm doesn't require you to listen to the music. It actually just needs you to to produce silences. By enclosing you – and silencing you, it can produce something for you that is potentially experienced as intimate and personal. But in fact you are only a presence and a supplier of quantities of silences; a material which you will produce for the rest of your life, and in the continuation after.
{function: proposal, keywords: [silence, sound, sculpture, loudspeaker, sound art, generative]}
