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Here are some recent sound installations
Writer Stephen Osborne with Cassia Streb
I originally created this piece to be performed in my backyard in the fall of 2013 and summed it up as "a sound collage that includes spoken word, a low-pitched sustaining quartet, a percussion duet and two vocalists."
The Coincidence Problem is a 30-minute sound collage comprised of 4 layers. The first is a recording of the writer, Stephen Osborne, reading a prose piece that has been punctuated with moments of silence and echos of fragments of the text. The second layer is a low-pitched sustaining quartet of contra-bassoon, bass, bass clarinet and cello. The third is a percussion duet performing a version of the punctuation found in the written work. The final layer is two vocalists who read, sing and occasionally perform fragments from the text. All events within the piece have been chosen through combinations of chance procedures and personal choices. Throughout the event the audience is free to wander where they like in order to investigate the sounds that are the most interesting to them.
A smart phone in use at the Vancouver presentation of he Coincidence Problem.
We realized another version of this piece at the Roundhouse in Vancouver, Canada in November of 2013. In this performance there were only vocalists performing live and so I re-wrote the parts for a collection of small ensembles and a large vocal group featured at the centre of the show. The space was reverberant and created an entirely different sound than the outdoor version.
This piece is inspired by Stephen Osborne's work, The Coincidence Problem. Read the entire essay here
Video is from the LA presentation of The Coincidence Problem
An array of speakers was arranged on the walls inside a small steel tool shed.The sound material consisted of recordings of water as well as water sounds created by acoustic instruments, field recordings and electronic means. From the outside of the closed shed all sounds blend together.The audience was invited to listen more closely with little images of ears affxed to the sides of the shed.
Some of these were placed directly over the speakers others in random spots between speakers. In this way viewers focused in on the individual sounds that create the whole.The purpose of the singing shed was to explore different levels of perception.
The perception of the sounds as a whole, the individual sounds, the creation of water sounds using non-liquid elements balanced against recordings of actual water and individual and group perceptions.The other aim of the project is to use the shed as an instrument of sorts, the structure itself being used to transmit the sounds.WaterShed was installed as part of the “Endurance Shed” series at Sea and Space gallery in Highland Park, Los Angeles in February, 2009.This piece was made in collaboration with Thadeus Frazer-Reed
In the spring of 2009 Thadeus Reed and I created these 5 birds out of paper mache and magazines as a par of New Town's On the Trail of... The show asked for artists to create works in multiples that could be placed throughout the Hahamonga Watershed park for a weekend in June.
Our birds have cardboard phonograph-like horns on their faces and small 8 ohm speakers housed inside their heads along with a battery pack and an mp3 player. They played re-imagined birdsongs that we created using viola, voice and/or digital processing. They also played voices reading the names of various birds from around the world.
The birds were placed throughout the park so that visitors would happen upon them as they wandered through the trails. The cones on the faces of the birds created a kind of sound tunnel so that often you would hear the birds before seeing them. This meant that we could hide them in the trees for listeners to discover. This was the desired effect as it is almost impossible to compete with nature when you are putting on a sound installation and instead we opted to sightly color the already full auditory palette. Thadeus and I work together often and we create works that invite the listener to be drawn in and listen more closely- if they so choose.
New Town offers grants and shows to local artists in Pasadena, CA
This piece is created by Cassia Streb and Aaron Drake and was installed in the Highways Performance Space and Gallery in Santa Monica as a part of a collective show in 2007. The appliances are staged at a luau with small chamber groups of electronics grouped together and are triggered on and off through a series of hidden analog electronic components. The toaster oven acts as a timer to activate the installation and to turn it off again. In this way we subtly invite the audience to participate and experience the cacophony of modern conveniences on holiday.
I put this installation together for a series at the Sea and Space gallery in Highland Park, Los Angeles in February of 2008. They asked us to create pieces for the “Endurance Van” which was a large passenger van parked at the curb outside the gallery. The idea is was to present works of extreme volume (loud or soft), duration (short or long), or sensation (overload or depravation) of some kind-with limited seating. There were shows going on inside the gallery itself but guests were invited to wander between the van and the gallery.
My piece focused on making each experience of this piece unique-in this case “extremely” unique or entirely unique-based on where you were sitting in the van as well as which recording you chose. At the time I was working in a theatre where we would sit in all of the different seats in the house in order to ensure that every person was enjoying the same concert experience. This, of course, was never possible due to the fact that amplified sound reaches each seat from a different angle and that there is an entire section of seats that falls outside the 5.1 speaker set-up. It was during one of these epic sound checks that I started to wonder how I could make a piece that set out to give every person an entirely unique experience from even the person sitting right next to them.
I took 4 different field recordings from various drives around Los Angeles, freeway, surface roads and with a variation on windows open and closed. I then set up my modest recording rig, an audio-transducer, Z4 recording drive and Garage Band, and listened back to my driving sounds while recording a delicate track of viola pitches and noises to highlight and blend the sounds of the road together. I chose a tuning for the viola for each recording as well as a particular sound palette or colour that complemented the drive. In some recordings I had a lot to say and in others there wasn’t a lot that needed to be added.
For the night of the performance I put a different track onto 4 tiny mp3 players and put them up on the wall along with the instructions and a set of headphones for each player. People were asked to take a player and a set of headphones to the van, sit in the seat buckle up and close their eyes. The sounds from the recording played while the real time traffic outside the van added the final layer to this sonic experience. The van itself shook in response to the traffic outside the gallery. I stuck small lights to the ceiling of the van above each seat so that the outside viewers could watch 4 strangers sit in a parked van with their seatbelt on and their eyes closed each enduring their personal sound world.
