IRFP Presents Jessica Rylan's Master's Thesis for Bard College

I presented this sound installation as my Master’s Thesis for the Bard College MFA program. The room I used was in a corner of the cavernous exhibition space. I chose the room because of the giant heater hanging from the ceiling. I was really interested in the idea of doing a fairly minimal installation, where this “pre-existing” installation was incorporated into my installation.

The room I used was separated from the main space by a short hallway. The left-hand wall creating the hall ends abruptly, so that when you get past its end you turn to your left and the room is open in front of you. When you looked up, you’d see the side of the heater. When you looked towards the back corner, you’d see three chairs, and the synthesizer.

In the corner was the hand-made analog synthesizer, pictured left, a dbx II noise reduction unit, and an amplifier. The pedestal they were sitting on was actually a pair of speakers, pointing into the corner. I draped the speakers so they’d be more like a pedestal, and less like speakers. I put the chairs there so people would get the idea to sit down and hang around for a while.

When you first walked into the room, you’d notice that there were two separate sounds going on. There was a constant high-pitched whistling sound, and a less-frequent lower-pitched sound. If you were really paying attention, you’d realize pretty quickly that the sounds were coming from different places. But if you weren’t paying attention, you’d figure it out as long as you sat down. The high sound came from a speaker that I hid in the heater. It was the most noticeable if you sat in one of the chairs and looked up.

The lower-pitched sound, which was kind of like a scratching scrape, was coming from the speakers under the synthesizer. However, because of its frequency range, and the fact that the speakers faced in to a corner, the sound was pretty well dispersed, and not as easy to localize. But the high sound, which was kind of like a squeaking mouse or a baby bird, was pretty clearly from up on high.

On the title page, it pointed out that the sounds were generated in “real time.” The chairs encouraged people to sit down and spend a while. So clearly the nature of time and the passage of time were important to me when I was putting this piece together. I had set up the synthesizer to continuously generate sounds that were constantly changing in certain ways, but always retained their own character. I wanted to use a machine to create a sound world that seemed like it could exist as a natural sound environment, but without being entirely referential. If I wanted to represent the natural world, it would be more conventional to use samples or field recordings. But I was more interested in synthetic sounds that acted like natural sounds.

There was no beginning or end to these sounds, they just went on continuously. If you spent a while hanging out in the room, they faded in to the environment. However, every once in a while something particularly dramatic would happen, like a strange stuttering rhythm would become evident, a particularly loud and high-pitched squeak would be heard, or something else to that effect. These little epiphanies would draw your attention back to the specifics of the sounds at hand. But you certainly couldn’t listen for them expectantly, because there was no knowing when one might come.