Site-specific, four-speaker sound installation
Japanese garden, Miami Beach Botanical Garden
October 11, 2001–January 10, 2002
Continuous fixed-media loop
The Japanese garden at Miami Beach Botanical Garden was intended as a place for quiet contemplation. Immediately beyond its fence, however, a busy bus stop regularly filled the garden with the low drones, hydraulic bursts, and other sounds of idling buses.
Rather than treat this as a noise problem to be corrected, I approached it as an opportunity to garden with sound.
I recorded the buses and studied the low frequencies produced while they idled. In response, I recorded sustained tones on a carpenter’s hand saw in related but higher registers. Complementary saw tones were distributed among four custom-designed speakers concealed within the garden. Sine waves provided occasional stable references against which these less stable sounds could be heard. Upper harmonics, hydraulic-brake bursts, and other characteristic details drawn from the bus recordings also entered the composition.
The four speakers faced inward. The installation did not react electronically to the buses; its continuous loop awaited their unpredictable arrivals. When a bus appeared, an immediate relationship formed between its actual sounds and the delicate field already growing inside the garden. When the bus departed, there could be a sense that something was missing.
I thought of the work as a filtering membrane—not a barrier that excluded the world outside, but a means of extracting something from it and returning it in another form. The installation did not produce silence. It created a listening situation of sufficient subtlety and complexity to quiet the mind and allow the garden and the bus to inhabit the same audible place.
The installation remained active around the clock. During garden hours, visitors could encounter it unexpectedly from within. After hours, traces could still be heard from the bus stop by a sufficiently curious ear.
PERFORMANCES
A series of improvised performances brought additional attention to the installation. I performed on hand saw with Armando Rodriguez on bagpipes and whistles, interacting with the continuing soundscape on four Second Thursdays:
October 11, 2001 — Opening event
November 8, 2001
December 13, 2001
January 10, 2002 — Closing event
CREDITS
Commissioned by the Miami Beach Garden Conservancy, with support from the Miami Beach Cultural Arts Council. Produced at the interdisciplinary Sound Arts Workshop (iSAW).
Coverage: Miami New Times
