Week 9 Forum Review

This week the diploma students presented talks on famous producers and learned about their techniques. Fortunately, I was part of a different group, one which formed the audience to Tristan Louth-Robins' presentation on his masters project. To say I was spellbound would be to overstate my feelings, seeing that a number of factors severely detracted from what could have been an enlightening talk.

While Tristan was presenting his concepts, my mind drifted back to my first experiments of similar nature, and an overwhelming sense of nostalgia filled my sinuses. I was 7 when my first encounter with the avante garde poked its head. Having noticed there is a discernible difference in sound quality between having headphones on my head and someone else wearing them, I decided to experiment with this phenomenon. My attempts were, indeed, naive, but these same concepts seem to drive me today. I remember getting my hand on all the headphones I could, then placing them on a tree in a spiral pattern so that each ear speaker is enveloped in a length of the adjacent pair's chord proportional to the diameter of the speaker cone combined with an algorhythm vaguely combining pi and the golden ratio (give or take a cent or 2... I was only 7). When music is played from a nearby fountain, the frequencies tend to align themselves harmonically, which could be displayed visually if you shined an ultraviolet beam through the water and onto a water colored fish tank enveloped in a thin layer of silver coated aluminum. There was some sort of movement in the water when there was wind, so I proclaimed the experiment a success.

Fast-forward 8 years later, and I still hadn't gone much further. I was now more interested in the effects of deep house music on sleeping mice, but since there were no mice in my house, I tested it on some insects. Most seemed to move as per usual, and only changed direction noticeably when the speaker was right in front of them or very close. I recorded these movements meticulously, using only my pencil and some teeth marks on it. When converting these movements to frequencies which controlled a MIDI orchestra, I was surprised to see how good the ants were at recreating grand works by John Cage! Seems like there's a bit of Cage in all of us.

Finally in year 12 I realized my first large work, and with the help of the London Symphony Orchestra (thanks Sir Colin Davis!) created something truly inspirational. A pure sine tone at 12,475.66680085 Hz was played loudly in the room while the orchestra prepared to improvise randomly filled with Vitamin E, in an effort to witness the effect of a powerful frequency to a supposedly atonal improvisatory setting aided by nutritional supplements. In addition, several live lions were kept nearby to keep the artists from fleeing and a large picture of John Cage was constantly projected on a star filled background in the space telescope we were rehearsing in at the time. As time went on, having microphones inside the performer's mouths proved to be a disappointment since the sound quality was poor and the room mic inside the first violin's boot was not picking up the necessary frequencies. However, the result was exactly as I intended it to the millisecond, and I couldn't be prouder.

Tristan's teapot, however, was out of tune and it made the whole experience a little less appealing. The idea of focused listening fell on unfocused ears and was therefore nullified. However it will be interesting to see how the project turns out, because Tristan has some nice ideas, just needs to think outside the square more (have you tried recording from a helicopter for example?). Either way, a nice way to spend and afternoon and looking forward to more innovative concepts.




Tristan Louth-Robins, student talk presented at EMU space, University of Adelaide, 10th May, 2007.