Resonant Objects

The artworks developed in this report, explore a critical engagement with sound installation and its realisation within architectural spaces. Sound installations engage with site through architectural and sonic interventions that embody a durational occupation with how sites, spaces and territories resonate with the memory of their social and cultural occupation. This report further considers how the properties of three sonic effects: reverberation, resonance and reflection, define acoustic territories and instigate sculptural objects of contemplation. It explores sound’s role in the determination of ‘place’ by investigating sound’s rich association with architectural space and how sound acts on, and is affected by, the built environment.

The report investigates phenomenology’s application to place making and human experience in the writings of Merleau-Ponty and his argument for the role that perception plays in how we understand and engage with the world. The Fold, Liebniz and the Baroque, by Gilles Deleuze, prompts an investigation into allegory within the Baroque House. It’s potential to creatively inform sculptural practice is explored by applying allegorical concepts to architectural models and sculptural objects. Pierre Schaeffer’s compositional technique of Musique Concrète, using the material of processed recorded sounds, is examined alongside the indeterminacy and non-intentionality of John Cage. The site of La Monte Young’s Dream House plays an essential role in developing ideas for transcendental, immersive sound experiences. Sound’s wider social, political and cultural contexts are explored through a study of ‘acoustic communities’, as described by R. Murray Schafer in The Soundscape: The Tuning of the World (1993). This culminates in the production of dematerialised sound derived objects encapsulated in an audio-visual transcendental realm, experienced through augmented reality.