thesis : resonance : afterthoughts

Resonating thoughts.

“To resonate: re-sonare. To sound again – with the immediate implication of a doubling. Sound and its double: sent back to us, reflected by surfaces, diffracted by edges and corners. Sound amplified, swathed in an acoustics that transforms it. Sound enhanced by its passing through a certain site, a certain milieu. Sound propagated, reaching out into the distance. But to resonate is also to vibrate with sound, in unison, in synchronous oscillation. To marry with its shape, amplifying a common destiny. To join forces with it. And then again, to resonate is to remember, to evoke the past and to bring it back. Or to plunge into the spectrum of sound, to shape it around a certain frequency.“ ²⁷

27. François Bonnet, Bartolomé Sanson “Spectres II, Resonances”, 9 Forewords.

Written after
a conversation of Ludwig Conistabile with Hannah de Vos
a conversation of Hannah de Vos with me
a conversation of me with Albert van Veenendaal:

Warming up the concert hall before a concert starts.
Warming up the space, warming up your instrument
with the sounds, with the music you will play during the concert.
Letting the space resonate.
Letting your body, letting the body of the instruments resonate.

Warming up your ears.
Listening to the resonance
and to the antiresonance ²⁸
of the room, instruments and bodies.

Warming up the audience.²⁹
To resonate with the entire space,
listening how the space returns the sound back to my body
to the body of others
to the body of the instruments³⁰

28. Antiresonance: tones that do not resonate.
Dissonance: different tones that are sounding at the same time but don’t resonate together, they have certain friction between each other.
29. In Hindustani music music from the north of India its usual to start a concert with an Alap, to warm up the instruments, musicians and the audience. https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alap_(muziek)
30. Okkyung Lee “Spectres II, Resonances”, 43 – 47 Five small stories.

Tomoko Sauvage writes in one part of her essay ‘A bowl of Ocean’ in the book “Spectres II, Resonances” about what a big impact the reverberation of a room has.³¹ Functioning as a natural amplifier; making the air, the water and the instruments fully vibrate.

I experimented playing the self-made 55Hz flute in different places in the KABK. The flute itself sounds loud when you are close to it, but when you move away, the sound quickly becomes softer. I thought it would be interesting to test the flute in a room with a lot of reverberation, to see if that would help the flute to sound louder. That’s why I brought the flute to Gallery 4. Testing different positions in the room I found one specific spot that was resonating more, but the resonating pitch was very precise. A bit higher or lower pitch and it would not resonate at all.

Being a sound artist often paying attention to soft sounds, I’m wondering about the impact of creating a space for a specific installation or making an installation for a specific space.

I’m used to work site specific outside: listening, observing, touching, feeling what is already there. Creating an artwork with and inspired by the place. Outside means less or no walls, less or no borders for the sounds to bounce, less or no reverb, less or no resonance? I do know, from screaming in nature that eco can exist, thanks to big ‘walls’ such as mountains and forests.

31. Tomoko Sauvage “Spectres II, Resonances”, 20 A bowl of Ocean.

shape : theory