sonic surrounds

I love sound art of all kinds.

But I find it very difficult to take when sound art ignores fundamental facts of acoustics, apparently just to attain a particular visual aesthetic.

Today on the wonderful Networked Music Review blog, I read of another example of a sound installation that raises this particular regrettable hackle of mine:

Unveiled Presence – Secret Sounds 2 by Natalie Bewernitz & Marek Goldowski @ Lab 30, pictured below (photo by unknown, via NMR blog).

I’ve written briefly (and incompletely) about this problem before, in my blog post multi-speaker installation art works: my gripes and likes…

One day, after I’ve finished my thesis, maybe I’ll dedicate some time to properly writing an article on these kinds of sound art works and their sonic and visual aesthetics - both those that respect and those that ignore acoustics.

In the meantime, here’s the (hopefully well measured) comment I left on the NMR blog entry about this artwork.

acoustics101

As aesthetically spare as this installation appears to be, the effect is completely VISUAL. It makes very little sense ACOUSTICALLY to install loudspeakers in this manner.

This installation does not respect basic acoustics!

That is, unless it is intentional to remove all frequencies below about 1700Hz (if these are 8inch drivers), which doesn’t seem to make sense for an installation purporting to celebrate the sounds of the New York subway.

As Wikipedia states:
The major role of the enclosure is to prevent the out of phase sound waves from the rear of the speaker from combining with the ‘in phase’ sound waves from the front of the speaker. This results in interference patterns and cancellation, causing the efficiency of the speaker to be reduced, particularly in the low frequencies where the wavelengths are large enough that interference will affect the entire listening area.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudspeaker_enclosure

So, if the spare aesthetic is desired, maybe the drivers should be small boxes or other small aesthetically pleasing units.

This basic fetishism for the form of the loudspeaker may feed some sort of minimalist gear porn sensitivities, but acoustically it is quaint at best, if not downright insulting.

Just uploaded to last.fm, a new track: Ode to Nanjing Lu originally made for the radio show Subsequence on 2XX FM, Canberra on request by Subsequence host Dan Mackinlay, one afternoon in Fremantle. The track includes several field recordings I made in Shanghai and it’s mildly inspired by a ragtag melange of influences::: playing big techno beats in reverberant chambers at The Great Escape festival 2007, dubstep basslines and textures of Burial, the Shanghai MagLev train, fake label touts on Nanjing Road, Shanghai, bamboo demolition scaffoldings and the stochastic rhythms of hand-wielded hammers breaking down bricks… and probably a few other things too.

The track’s free and you can hear it here:

Nick Mariette – Ode to Nanjing Lu