Gustavo Matamoros
Cylinder (2023)
Cylinder (2023) is a 68-minute site-specific resonance portrait created for the 20-foot-diameter i360 XR Theater space inside the Glenn Hubert Library at Florida International University’s Biscayne Bay Campus.
The work uses the theater’s 7.1.4 Dolby Atmos configuration of Neumann KH 80 monitors and a subwoofer. It premiered on September 27, 2023, repeating over the course of a six-hour Subtropics 2023 Marathon satellite event. It was presented again in 2024 and is now part of the i360 Theater collection.
THE WORK
Cylinder developed during my artistic residency at the i360 Theater. I began by mapping the room with controlled acoustic feedback sent through all of its speakers. Although the theater is heavily treated acoustically, the process revealed an unusually large number of usable resonant frequencies—more than I had found in many naturally reverberant spaces.
Rather than use those frequencies only as a harmonic palette, I worked with them sculpturally. Different tones excited different areas of the cylinder, and slight changes in frequency could shift the resulting resonant nodes from one part of the room to another.
This created two overlapping forms of spatialization. The Dolby Atmos system allowed me to position and move tones virtually through its eleven speakers, while the architecture produced its own physical locations through resonance. A tone could be projected toward one area while the room reinforced it somewhere else.
I also used a pitch follower to generate a tone that attempted to track another tone. As intensity changed, it could attach itself to a nearby resonance and sweep slowly toward it. These movements are subtle, but they allow the sound field to shift gradually without settling into a fixed spatial arrangement.
Because these forms of spatialization overlap, no two listeners experience precisely the same thing. A resonance present on one side of the room may be weak or absent somewhere else, while another tone becomes prominent. The listener’s position becomes part of the composition.
THE IMAGES
The cylindrical screen is visually prominent and creates an expectation that something will be projected. Leaving it blank—or eliminating light entirely—made its empty presence distracting.
I therefore selected dimmed color fields and public-domain photographs that are nearly static and visually understated. They give seated listeners somewhere for their eyes to rest without illustrating the sound or competing for attention. The images are interesting enough not to feel absent, but restrained enough to return attention to listening. This choice also introduced the faint mechanical sound of the running projectors into the environment.
THE RECORDING
The recording presented here contains the complete 68-minute work. It was made from a stationary position inside the i360 Theater using a Sennheiser AMBEO microphone and rendered binaurally for headphone listening.
The recording does not capture the entire phenomenon of Cylinder. It represents one listening position among many possible perspectives. Resonances that reached the microphone strongly may have behaved quite differently elsewhere in the room.
The situation is somewhat like viewing a sculpture: what one person sees from the front is not what another sees from the opposite side. In Cylinder, however, the work also unfolds over time. Moving through the room may reveal a previously unheard resonance, but something else may emerge in the place just left behind. There is no definitive listening position from which the complete work can be heard.
The stationary recording embraces that limitation. It does not attempt to offer a comprehensive experience, but preserves one valid encounter with the work. When listening, I recommend allowing its dynamic range to unfold without repeatedly adjusting the volume. Some tones arrive quietly, while others are strongly reinforced by the position of the microphone.