SMALL SOUNDS
Small Sounds is an evolving practice of finding ways to listen from closer within things.
Many of these sounds are difficult or impossible to perceive through ordinary listening. They may occur within an object, against a surface, underwater, beneath bark or beyond the usual range of human hearing. I use phono cartridges, piezoelectric elements, contact and insertion microphones, hydrophones, ultrasonic microphones and other adapted transducers to gain access to these different listening positions.
The transducers do more than make quiet sounds louder. Each establishes a particular relationship with what is being heard. A contact microphone listens through vibration in a material. An insertion microphone enters a small opening or hidden environment. A hydrophone listens through water. An ultrasonic microphone makes activity beyond the ordinary range of hearing available for recording and study.
The practice began to take shape around 1990. Russell Frehling gave me one of several phono cartridges David Tudor had found in Japan and later given to him. Russell knew David through his participation in tours of Tudor’s Rainforest. On April 14, 1990, Russell, David Weisbrott and I used three of these cartridges to perform John Cage’s Cartridge Music during Subtropics.
A phono cartridge is designed to read the minute physical variations in the groove of a record. Applied to other objects, it becomes something like a microscope for sound, making the vibrations of tiny materials available for close listening. It became an important tool in my Small Sounds work, although never the only one.
When David Dunn came to Miami in 2005 to conduct a workshop for iSAW, my vocabulary of transducers expanded. It came to include piezo hydrophones, bark-beetle insertion microphones, ultrasonic boundary and insertion microphones used for recordings of bats and ants, and another form of piezo-based cartridge. Other devices entered the practice as I encountered them, including a suction-cup microphone whose manufacturer I no longer remember.
I collect many of the objects used in these works during listening walks through Miami and wherever else I happen to be working. They come from beaches, the Everglades, parking lots, restaurants, friends’ apartments and other places where small things accumulate or have been left behind. A cat’s whisker can be amplified enormously in order to study its particular sound signature.
Sometimes I have stolen very small things from the floors of friends’ apartments when they appeared to have discarded them. When I met Sam Ashley, he told me I was collecting oracles. He and I really hit it off, I think.
Small Sounds has taken the form of recordings, performances and installations. In each case, the sounds enter a different relationship with objects, architecture, people and the circumstances in which they are heard.
SMALL SOUNDS ON TAPE
Small Sounds on Tape—also presented under the title Small Sounds on Cassette—is a series of cassette cases containing tiny objects and debris gathered during walks. The cases hold the collections in place and make them visible, but the objects remain silent unless someone shakes them. When shaken, they become small instruments—although some of their contents may also spill through the openings in the cassette cases. To hear the work is to alter it: the contents shift visibly and may spill out of their cases.
Featured image: Small Sounds on cassette
SELECTED SMALL SOUNDS WORKS
Piece for Small Sounds (1994)
For two performers using amplified small sounds
Small Sounds for Sale (2001)
A performance in which works were recorded, mixed, mastered and published on CD during the event
Small Sounds in the Workplace (2008)
A six-channel site-specific sound installation inside a working dental clinic
Small Sounds on a Table Top (2009)
A directional sound installation presenting highly localized amplified sounds
Small Sounds in a Large Space (2016)
A six-channel acousmatic composition
Small Sounds in a Smaller Space (2017)
A four-channel acousmatic work
Small Sounds Up the Wall (for Alison Knowles) (2018)
A sixteen-channel sound installation created for Audiotheque 2.0
Small Sounds Up the Wall (for Alison Knowles) (2018) | Excerpt | 2′28″ | Binaural documentation of the original sixteen-channel installation. Audiotheque 2.0, Miami Beach, Florida | September 13–December 15, 2018
SMALL SOUNDS UP THE WALL
Small Sounds Up the Wall was one of Four Audible Experiences of Movement of Sound in Space, created for the opening exhibition of Audiotheque 2.0 in 2018. Each of the four works was dedicated to an artist I knew and admired. This one was for Alison Knowles, a friend and collaborator.
The work used fourteen small K-array loudspeakers and two subwoofers. Five speakers were arranged across the upper part of the wall, four through the middle and five near the floor. The small sounds traced patterns primarily upward and downward in front of the listener, while also moving from side to side.
The scale of the source material remained intimate, but its movement became architectural. Sounds gathered from minute objects appeared to climb, descend and draw temporary paths across the wall.
Selected Small Sound Pieces
Claudia de la Plage de Miami Beach, FLA/BRA Festival, Audiotheque, Miami Beach | April 2, 2014
Small Sounds for Sale, FLARB Media Festival, Aqua Hotel, Miami Beach | August 23, 2002
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Small Sounds on a Table Top · Small Sounds in the Workplace · Audiotheque 2.0 · Four Audible Experiences of Movement of Sound in Space