Resonant Spaces - Silo City
Installation for null point 7. Decay/Reverberate: Site Specific Sound at Silo City, Buffalo, NY, June 11-14, 2015.
Three snare drums with transducers, each drum driven by a sound file cycling through recordings of its own rim shots.
Each placed in different resonant environments throughout the site: one inside the Perot Malt House, with an approximate 3 second decay time; one outdoors, near the American Elevator; and one inside silo 52 of the Marine A Elevator, with an approximate 10-second decay time.
The sounds of these hybrid electronic and acoustic instruments activate the resonant frequencies of their locations, highlighting the materiality of their staging sites by illuminating acoustic and physical properties of the surrounding concrete.
The staging points of the drums are linked by the consistency of their sound material, and defined in relationship to one another by resonant acoustic, as dry and fragile sound outdoors is trapped and amplified when enclosed.
Participants stopping to listen to a beacon in one location experience an afterimage of the others, hearing the interaction between environmental and beacon sounds nearby and at great distance. They engage, simultaneously, the acoustic reality of their immediate locations, and a wider geography defined in their memories by the sites of other beacons, generating a sonic and architectural topography operating at an expanse and duration both unpredictable and too large to fully grasp at any individual instant.
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