The body is where sound is born. Sound is simply motion until the body transforms oscillation into sensation in a messy, subjective process.

From the material through which sound moves to the anatomical variations in each ear and brain, the chain of dependencies between sound and understanding is rife with distortion and occlusion. The physicality of sound and the phenomenon of listening are dependent on reciprocal movement and reciprocal intention. The four works in reciprocation reimagine loudspeakers – transforming them from “invisible” aural channels into sculptural objects to interrogate interpersonal relationships, (mis)communications, and the kinetic phenomenon of sound. While recorded audio is used to drive the loudspeakers and implicate the viewer-listener’s body, the heard sound is an artifact of the materials activated by the speakers’ movement. This was my thesis project for my MFA in Intermedia and Digital Arts from University of Maryland - Baltimore County.

drawings created by a machine listening to itself

In Claude Shannon’s model of communication, “equivocation” refers to the average uncertainty in the message delivered when the message sent is known. After the meaningful message is subtracted from the signal, the residual uncertainty must be due to the noise of the channel. If we are to estimate the fidelity and capacity of the media through which a message is communicated, noise must be present.

This series of drawings on paper explores equivocation using a digital pen plotter. The plotter is capable of rendering very precise images on predetermined paths, with choice of surface and implement introducing the most noise in the final result. In these experiments, however, the plotter’s motors are programmed in real time, leveraging the machine’s unequivocal precision to expose the noise present in the transmission of data to digital movement. The drawings are spatial documents of temporal processes, while the sound magnifies the physicality of the machine’s maneuvers in the installation space.

In some experiments, a simple process is continuously executed without regard for the plotter’s limitations, the pen sometimes moving erratically as the motors struggle to comply with the impossible speeds dictated by the algorithm. In others, the drawing board’s vibrations are captured with piezo microphones and its motors’ electromagnetic fields with telephone taps, attempting to convert these audio signals to position data and back again in iterative cycles. The circuit between “virtual” and “actual” is complicated by feedback – not to achieve equilibrium, but to materialize uncertainty in the translation between different machine epistemologies.

8- or 16-channel audio, steel mixing bowls, generative

This installation turns inert objects into resonant vessels which sing to themselves. Each steel bowl has a contact microphone and transducer attached, creating a feedback loop across its surface as the microphone picks up the transducer’s output. Software listens and adjusts the signal flow, allowing a variety of sonic results to emerge based on the bowls’ resonant frequencies. The vibrations from visitors’ movement may also add slight disruption to this signal chain, magnified by the exponential nature of feedback.