Coming Monday and Tuesday I’ll work with Jana on further development of the “Kunsten å gå på vannet” installation. I guess we’ll be doing a brand new version.
Though the kids in general has enjoyed the installation a lot we want to strengten the concept. In my view one of the weeknesses has been that there’s no good reason why we’ve chosen the sounds we are using instead of others apart from the fact that we’ve searched for sounds and combinations of sounds that work musically.
I’m going to suggest to Jana that we work on two different classes of sounds: musical (pitched) sounds and ambient (noisy or non-pitched) sounds suggesting soundscapes. The ambient sounds should all be associated with water moving in one way or another (thus relating to the title of the work: “The art of Walking on Water”): raindrops waves at the shoreline or the sound of a brook. I’d like these sounds to be somewhat abstracted suggesting well-known soundscapes but at the same time offering a twisted and abstracted view of it. Possible ways of doing this could be to use FFT to split various frequency bands to different loudspeakers or using rather short samples looping and with a regular delay from one loudspeaker to the next thus creating a slight rhythmic and repetitious pattern into the sounds. The pitched sounds would form a clear contrast to this and establish the background layer (the ever-present ambience) and the foreground (sounds triggered by the sensors) as two distinct layers. Possible pithed sounds could be: pitched raindrops (e.g. by feeding the sound of raindrops into resonant models) fog horns etc. This way the interactive sounds could relate more clearly to the actual movements in the room by the kids: The kids could become raindrops boats lost at the sea etc.
If Jana agrees on these ideas this will be an opportunity to work at some issues that I have been thinking about for a while now. In addition the pitched part of the total sound composition would be a responce to my instinct reaction when listening to a number of mp3s at Ubuweb yesterday. After a while I suddenly thought “Now it would be nice with some pitched music.”.
Jana has not succeeded to raise money for further development so this will be something we do out of our own interest. I suppose that when an organization commision a work like this they are thinking in terms of a finished permanent product. For us the artists the process is an integral part of the work and the work will in some ways cease to exist when it’s not being activly developed anymore.
