2009 | Site-specific public sound installation | 8 channels | 13 hours
Site-specific, eight-channel public sound installation
conceived and designed by Gustavo Matamoros
Performed live by Frozen Music: Rene Barge, David Dunn, and Gustavo Matamoros
Commissioned by the City of Miami Beach for Sleepless Night
Collins Canal, Miami Beach
November 7–8, 2009 | 13 hours
LISTEN
Canal (2009) | 5′02″ excerpt from the thirteen-hour performance. Stereo mix combining the direct audio with two microphones placed in the installation | © 2009, Subtropics Editions.
Canal was a 1,000-foot-long sound installation created for Collins Canal, behind the Miami Beach Convention Center. Eight loudspeakers extended along the street-side walkway from Convention Center Drive to Washington Avenue, projecting sound toward the water approximately fifty feet away.
The installation established the physical, technical, and spatial conditions for a continuous performance by Frozen Music, the collaborative trio of Rene Barge, David Dunn, and Gustavo Matamoros. It was the collective’s first performance.
THE BEGINNING OF FROZEN MUSIC
Following my performance of Piano Marina in 2008, Gary Farmer invited me to create a work for the canal as part of Sleepless Night 2009. Around the same time, a conversation during Subtropics 20 raised a simple question: if people were not coming to experimental music, why not bring the work to places where people already gathered?
I shared the idea for Canal with David Dunn, and we decided to begin an ensemble. We then invited Rene Barge, with whom I was also collaborating at the time, to join us. The installation became the framework for Frozen Music’s first performance and the situation in which we began discovering what the collective could be.
FEEDBACK LISTENING
All three performers worked from a single station at the eastern end of the installation. Each performer’s eight-channel output entered separate channels of a 32-channel, eight-bus mixer, allowing us to move sounds independently through the same eight loudspeakers.
Frozen Music was not based on improvising toward a mutually satisfying musical result. Nor were we trying to make the accumulated sounds beautiful or interesting. Our strategy was feedback listening.
Each of us introduced a sound stimulus and listened for what it did: how it combined with other sounds, how it behaved in the site, and whether something emerged that seemed worth exploring further. What we heard informed what we did next.
Because the installation sounded different at every location, I would leave the performance station and walk along the canal while my sounds continued to run. This allowed me to compare what I was hearing from the base location with what was actually happening throughout the work. It never sounded the same everywhere, but it sounded as it should.
The thirteen-hour duration gave us room to experiment, become increasingly comfortable with the process, and begin learning what Frozen Music was—and what it would later become.
THE SITE
The loudspeakers projected from the walkway toward the water. The speakers themselves were not highly directional, and the interaction among their dispersion, the canal, the surrounding architecture, vegetation, ambient city sound, and moving listeners produced unpredictable acoustical conditions. Once heard, these conditions could become material for further exploration.
Listeners encountered the work while walking rather than from a fixed audience position. The piece therefore changed not only through our actions but through each listener’s movement along its approximately 1,000-foot length.
The walkway’s bright lights were covered with magenta gels. This softened and unified the visual field without leaving the canal in darkness. The colored light also marked the physical extent of the installation, quietly signaling that visitors had entered a work.
SOUND AND MOVEMENT
David Dunn performed with autonomous chaotic oscillators; Gustavo Matamoros with Small Sounds and electronics; and Rene Barge with electronic sounds. At times their independent materials accumulated into dense masses. At others they separated, shifted location, or traveled along the canal. The work could also settle into quieter textures in which individual sounds emerged and receded.
The installation established the conditions; Frozen Music activated them. The resulting work arose through a continuous cycle of placing sound, listening to its consequences, and responding to what became audible.
LISTEN
Canal (2009) | 5′00″ excerpt from the thirteen-hour performance. Stereo mix combining the direct audio with two microphones placed in the installation | © 2009, Subtropics Editions.
The performance continued nonstop from 6 p.m. until 6 a.m. Because it crossed the overnight return from daylight-saving time, twelve hours on the clock became thirteen elapsed hours. Organizers estimated that approximately 120,000 people attended Sleepless Night and that some 50,000 encountered Canal during the event.
STORIES AND REVIEWS
Sound Expanse: Frozen Music — Canal
Knightarts: Already Sleepless Dreaming of Frozen Music
Networked Music Review: Introducing Frozen Music
Frozen Music: Miami Beach Support Letter
TAGS: Frozen Music, David Dunn, Rene Barge, feedback listening, site-specific sound, public sound installation, eight-channel, Collins Canal.