Proposal for sound installation for video screening room at List Gallery
Jessica Rylan 8/03
It is most likely true that, as Audre Lourde said, "The Master's tools will never dismantle the Master's house." But in examining those tools, one may learn key information not only about the system's construction, but also its vulnerabilities.
The techniques of the mass media are a favorite subject of the contemporary critic. The various techniques are examined in the context of the social effects which they create. Sometimes the history of a particular technique is explored. But what of the tools themselves, whose invention made possible these technniques in the first place?
One interesting case is the Altec-Lansing Company's loudspeaker systems, originally intended for the enormous movie theaters which flourished in between the two World Wars, vanishing near the end of the 1950's. The "Shearer Horn" system, designed by Lansing Manufacturing engineers and produced by MGM, had revolutionized film sound in movie houses throughout the world upon its introduction in 1934. Capable of previously unprecedented bass performance, the system also had the benefit of accurate time allignment, and a smoother overall frequency response.
But it was Altec's second-generation theater system, The Voice of the Theatre, which had the most lasting impact. This system, introduced in 1945, immediately became a staple in the maintenance of the movie palace. With this series of products, Altec created a near monopoly over movie theater sound systems, lasting into the 1970's. Utilizing new concepts in bass enclosures, and the synthetic Alnico magnets perfected as part of the war effort, the Voice of the Theatre system offered greater efficiency, higher output volumes, and lower distortion.
Or considered another way: the Voice of the Theatre system's increased frequency range and greatly increased volume were necessary to maintain the interests of the millions of shell-shocked soldiers (and civillians) returning home from the front, deafened and desensitized by the unprecedented noise show of modern weaponry.
The massive bass cabinets, standing up to 8 feet tall and weighing up to 1200 pounds apiece, greatly outperformed their Shearer predecessors. Altec's engineers were particularly proud of the bass cabinets. In fact, these low-frequency enclosures primarily defined the new Voice of the Theatre line. Sitting on top of the Voice of the Theatre's bass cabinets were the high-frequency multicellular horns, reproducing the sizzle of explosions and the intellegibility of speech. The 1945 Altec catalog mentions the horns more in passing than anything else; after all, they were a fairly modest refinement of a product line Altec had been successfully manufacturing since the early 1930's. But Altec's product specification sheets also point out that the horns alone were perfectly effective for voice-only applications, for example paging systems in factories and military bases, sporting events or political rallies. Thus, while Altec's engineers placed their primary focus in 1945 on their newly developed bass cabinets, the voice itself actually resided in the horns.
The early multicellular horns featured cast aluminum shells filled with a vibration-damping tar. Weighing some 30-50 pounds, they served as an amplifying trumpet for between one and four drive units, weighing 20 pounds a piece. The construction of the horns required vast amounts of electricity. The purification of the aluminum alone required on the order of 360 kW hours. In contrast, the finished product was extremely efficient at converting electricity into sound, requiring only 1 W to reproduce a sound in excess of 113 dB at a distance of three feet. To put this in perspective, using the same amount of energy required to process the aluminum in one horn, a finished horn could produce a sound much louder than a car horn at close range, continuously for forty years!
The incredible concentration of electrical power involved in the horn's fabrication allowed the Master an unprecedented social and political power. Two horns, consuming 80 Watts, as much electricity as one soft white light bulb, could hold enthralled an audience of up to 1200.
In my installation, The Voice of the Theatre, I would like to present the theater's true voice. In a room draped with heavy velvet curtains and fringed at the ceiling with gold tassels, I would like to present three Altec-Lansing 805 horns, each on its own pedestal, with its own spotlight. Each speaker will have its own soundtrack, composed specifically for thie film without dialog, actors, or even moving images. Each soundtrack will be continuously changing within its own parameters. One soundtrack will be a constant drone, emphasizing the upper harmonics of 60 Hz, the sonic byproduct of electric power generation. (One is reminded of Hiedi von Gunden's story of the young Pauline Oliveros riding her bicycle to the fence outside the power plant late at night, sitting and listening to this free concert for hours.) A second soundtrack will represent film, with its techniques of cut-up, montage, percieved temporal discontinuity, and rigid adherence to the 1/24th second blurred-discrete time interval. The third soundtrack will represent the human, while eschewing human-produced sounds. After all, there never was a human to see, just patterns of light and dark flickering on a screen.
My Theatre won't have any seats, but will instead present a physical space for sonic exploration. The soundtracks will each be created with different amounts of activity and silence, mindful of how the three will interact and overlap in time. In addition, the horns will be placed physically with great attention to the overlap of their well-defined dispersion. The horns will be aimed to create specific zones in space where one, two, or all three are most active. This effect will be greatly accentuated by using the horns in an unconventional near-field application. Originally intended to project from behind the screen all the way back to the 200th row, the speakers will instead be placed next to each other along the gallery's 29-foot back wall, facing the near wall only 8 feet from their mouths. Lighting for the installation will be minimal, just one spotlight for each of our three heroes. The heavy draping of the room is important not only to set the stage for this movie about the theater, but also to eliminate the reflection of sound off of the ceiling and walls. Just as the focused spotlights shine only on their targets, the sound-fields of each speaker must be confined to their well-defined dispersion patterns, so each beam of sound is like a single ray of light, or the crisp contrast between good and evil in the late 1940's Hollywood movie.
Sources
- Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, New York: Verso, 1997.
- Heidi Von Gunden, The Music of Pauline Oliveros, 1983, out of print.
- Altec Lansing Corporation, Voice of the Theatre Catalog, 1945, and Multicellular Horn Specification Sheet (1950s?)