Small Sounds in the Workplace (2008)
Six-source sound installation
Six self-powered speakers with independent random playback
Art@Work, Mosquera Orthodontics, Miami
March 17–May 2, 2008
Small Sounds in the Workplace (2008) | 2′56″ | Stationary mid-side stereo recording made inside the installation. This excerpt documents one moment in the changing interaction among its six independent sound sources and the architecture of the clinic.
Small Sounds in the Workplace was created at the invitation of Arturo Mosquera for Art@Work, an ongoing exhibition program he conceived and curated at Mosquera Orthodontics in Miami.
Small Sounds result from actions upon small objects: touching, rubbing, scraping, tapping and otherwise probing them to discover their particular audible capacities. The short sounds that emerge from these encounters tend to combine easily with one another. When separated in space, they behave less like musical gestures than like small events occurring within an environment.
The source material came from my existing library of Small Sounds recordings, which I selected and prepared specifically for this installation.
For this installation, six self-powered speakers were distributed throughout the working clinic. Each speaker had its own player, which selected short sound files at random. With no common sequence governing them, sounds appeared independently from different rooms and locations during clinic hours.
Some blended naturally with the ordinary activity of the workplace; some even resembled drilling. Together they formed a changing soundscape—not unlike the scattering of small events one might hear in a garden or in the Everglades. Rather than imposing a composition upon the clinic, the installation allowed the architecture, daily activity and accidental concurrence of sounds to continually compose what could be heard.
The stationary mid-side recording above captures one such concurrence, preserving something of the location, distance and intensity of the sounds within the building. It is not a mixdown of the six channels, but one listening position within the installation.
PRESS
“Small Sounds in the Workplace, represents a continuation of his work with sound produced by small objects. In this case, several autonomous sound sources are distributed around the work area, each containing iterations of small sounds, some human-made, others natural. The sounds blend into the work environment in ways similar to what happens in a relatively quiet garden.”
—Miami Art Guide, 2008
Miami Art Magazine preview:
[Gustavo Matamoros at Art@Work (PDF)]
Featured photograph: Interior of Mosquera Orthodontics during the recording of Small Sounds in the Workplace, Miami, 2008. The installation’s six speakers were distributed throughout the clinic and are not visible here. Photograph by Gustavo Matamoros.