2008
Video composition and process document, 6′36″
Controlled-feedback mapping of the Bass Museum of Art
Miami Beach, Florida
Acoustical Portrait (2008), 6′36″. Complete video composition documenting a controlled-feedback mapping of the main second-floor gallery at the Bass Museum of Art. Camera: Randall Beaver. Composed and edited by Gustavo Matamoros.
DESCRIPTION
Acoustical Portrait is a video composition made while mapping the acoustical signature of the main second-floor gallery at the Bass Museum of Art. The session was conducted in preparation for SOUND, a group exhibition presented in 2009 as part of the twentieth Subtropics Festival.
Using a microphone connected to an amplified loudspeaker, I moved through the gallery searching for positions at which controlled feedback would reveal the room’s resonant frequencies. The microphone, architecture, amplification and my own movement formed a responsive system: a slight change of position could alter an existing tone, reveal another frequency or return the room to silence.
The soundtrack consists entirely of the feedback tones, silences and ambient sounds captured during the session. In editing the video, I removed some extended silences and crossfaded between shots. The complete composition lasts 6′36″, including approximately four seconds of black and silence at its conclusion.
The mapping also served a practical purpose. The museum gallery was highly reverberant and was intended to contain eight- to ten-channel soundscapes by several artists. Identifying its strongest resonances helped us select, position and tune the works for the space. De-emphasizing particularly dominant frequencies improved the clarity—or legibility—of the individual installations and contributed significantly to the success of SOUND as a group exhibition.
The completed video was subsequently published on the interdisciplinary Sound Arts Workshop’s YouTube channel.
FISHING FOR RESONANCE
Fishing for resonance is an engaging way of discovering the acoustical signature of an architectural space. A microphone is attached to a pole, connected through amplification to a loudspeaker and moved slowly through a room until feedback occurs. The tone appears to come out of thin air, but it makes audible a property already present in the relationship among the room’s dimensions, surfaces, microphone and speaker.
Changing the microphone’s position may alter the tone or reveal another one. Taken together, these frequencies become elements of the space’s acoustical portrait.
I learned this process from Russell Frehling in the mid-1980s while assisting him with several of his installations. Russell used the term “acoustical signature” to describe the distinctive resonant behavior of a place. His informal mentorship during that period profoundly influenced the development of my own work with sound and architecture.
When resonant frequencies are played back into the space from which they emerged, I think of them as being “right at home.” They respond to the architecture rather than to an externally imposed system such as equal temperament. Their microtonal relationships may appear out of tune when heard elsewhere, yet within the space that produced them they have a natural tendency to coexist.
For me, these resonances can function as tour guides: audible features through which the architecture describes itself. Somewhere within those relationships are clues to what makes a space acoustically beautiful—whether it is quiet or filled with sound.
Adapted from a text written June 21, 2006, during the period in which I was developing Organic Pipes for Vizcaya Museum and Gardens.
EXHIBITION CONTEXT
SOUND
Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach
2009
Presented in celebration of Subtropics 20
Supported by the Knight Foundation
CREDITS
Concept, feedback activation, sound and video editing: Gustavo Matamoros
Camera: Randall Beaver
Controlled-feedback process learned through the mentorship of Russell Frehling
Produced at the interdisciplinary Sound Arts Workshop (iSAW)
© 2008 Gustavo Matamoros / Subtropics Editions