View of entry curtains through glass doors. My piece is installed in a small gallery off of the main entrance of the building. The main gallery is across the hall.
Once you go through the curtains, you find yourself in an empty, dark room. The speakers are against the far wall, to your left, twenty-five feet away. The sound is a slightly off-kilter click, accompanied by a quieter spray of pops and ticks, and a faint hum. When you stand at the back of the room, the sound clearly seems to come from the speakers. But if you walk right up to the speakers, the source seems to shift, and you begin to hear the reflection of the clicks off the back wall as strong as the original coming out of the horns.
Side view of installation. The horn on the floor is plugged directly into the wall, and hums quietly. When the machines in the basement turn on and off, it creates a disturbance on the power line and you hear it through the horn.
Detail of left horn, showing microphone stuck into its mouth. The synthesizer generates the clicking sounds you hear. The original clicks are amplified by the Allen Organ amplifier, and fed to the left horn. The microphone listens to this horn's output, and the signal is amplified by a tube amplifier I built, and fed to the right horn. So the right horn reproduces what the left one is saying, but at a slight delay. Together, the horns create a three-dimensional space.
Close-up of table, showing (from left) Allen Organ Amplifier, Modular Synthesizer, and variac. The variac acts as a volume control for the horn on the floor.
Diagram of the synthesizer patch I used. The "Doom" noise is simply a very low frequency noise source. I originally had a lot of other modules patched in, but the more I stripped them away, the better it sounded to me. The horns sound so fast, I didn't want to slow the sound down.
I would like to thank Bill Arning and the List for providing me with the space and assistance to realize this piece, the Coolidge Corner for lending me the speakers, Jason Sanford for lending me the Allen amplifier, and my parents for too many things to write down.