Wire Music
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Alan Lamb is the typical do-it-yourself type musician. He has been clambering up and down telephone poles all over Western Australia recording the Aeolian characteristics of long cables...

...some of the longest found objects in the archive.
This is what he says on the subject:


"As I went under the new telegraph wire, I heard it vibrating like a high harp overhead. It was as the sound of a far-off glorious life, a supernal life, which came down to us , and vibrated the lattice work of this life of ours"

It is perhaps not too far fetched to suggest that wire music is an aural embodiment of some of the most fundamental dynamic laws of the universe.' A.L.

Here are some observations from Andrew McLennan on other Australians who have got swept off their feet in the wind and wire story.


Stray thoughts on WIND and wire in Australian sound art
by Andrew McLennan

There is always a kind of fine Aeolian harp music to be heard in the air. I hear it now, as it were, the mellow sounds of distant horns in the hollow mansions of the upper air, a sound to make all men divinely insane that hear it far away overhead, subsiding into my ear. To ears that are expanded what a harp this world is. (1) (H.D. Thoreau, July 21, 1851)

Years back in Adelaide, during the second wave (or was it the third?) of sound awareness in Australia, when representatives of the World Soundscape Project were roaming Australia searching for 'keynotes' and 'earwitness reports', about the time when John Cage made his one and only solo appearance on these fatal shores ('but how do you live in this country?') at the 1976 Adelaide Festival, I was taking a workshop in the Art of Radio for the SA Association for Community Theatres. I encouraged the participants to roam the streets of Adelaide with tape recorders, in search of interesting sounds. One group, among whom were several sculptors, almost instinctively stumbled on a quintessentially Australian sound- the twanging of taut fencing wire stretched around the perimeter of the Colonel Light parklands. With several tensile strands at their disposal they 'played' the fence as if it were second nature to them, in one stroke evoking both the image of boundary and the (sonic) escape from this enclosure, mediated by the wire itself. The first such signals were morse code conveyed electronically, but anyone who has heard the wind playing telegraph wires knows that there are other messages in the ether.

Some years later (1982) I was not surprised to hear of a genuine fence music devised by composer/performers Warren Burt and Chris Mann. Improvising on Chris' property at Launching Place, Upper Yarra, they used fencing wire to construct an enormous electric guitar . Using a tractor to apply the necessary tension, and not just passively listening in, Burt animated the wires by bolting transducers to their ends in order to longitudinally amplify and modify the speaking voice of Chris Mann. Microphones picked up the vibrations at suitable nodes which where then fed back to the transducers to set up howling harmonic chords enveloping Chris Mann's spoken message. The installation complied with a fad of composer Burt at the time for low tech, 'scratch' electronics, and was 'funky', overlaid with the grundge inherent in heavy gauge, used fencing wire, especially as not all of the kinks had been straightened out. The piece was later brought into an ABC studio for a recording session, the wires attached to the sounding board of an upright piano jammed into a studio airlock, to amplify resonant frequencies.

(Thoreau, 1851)

Thoreau's 'new telegraph wire' could have been any of those installed by the burgeoning American telegraph company's. The first Morse telegraphic transmission was accomplished in 1844. The transcontinental telegraph wire connecting the east and west coasts of America was completed in 1861. Australia's first transcontinental telegraph wire was completed in 1872. Running North-South from Port Augusta to Port Darwin it connected Australia telegraphically with the rest of the world for the first time. It is alleged that the Aboriginal people through whose country it passed referred to it as the 'Singing Wire', although some of them, it is reported, were not too impressed with it as a fence.

The Aboriginal people have their own way of stirring the air. Their sacred bullroarer (kalligooroo) is kept with other Tjuringas. They are carved wooden totemic artifacts with aerodynamic properties. Swung around the head by a string they produce quivering vibrations in the air and have particular significance for initiation rites.

The early Australian composer Percy Grainger had also marveled at the sound of the telegraph wire and other sounds that he observed in natural forms. His dreams of a 'free music' that might trace those forms began back in his teens.

Probably music of the future will be performed by machines not musicians. A composer will make his own machine (like an inventor). most likely his own sound colours (like painter with his colours). will perfect composition and performance of same right by himself... every shade of expression that the nerves can feel can be reproduced on spur of moment can be kept forever (7) (sic)(Grainger 1901)

It was not until the 1950's that he first began experimenting with devices to realise the music he heard so vividly in his head. These experiments began with microtonally tuned pianos, and player pianos. By playing string clusters in glissandi the adapted pianos simulated gliding tones. Later his Reed Box Tone Tool attempted the same thing, although this time with wind and reeds. Rolls of personally punched paper were drawn across a kind of infinite mouth organ, once again with microtonally tuned reed boxes, thus avoiding the struck or percussive nature of the piano strings. The air for the 'tone tool' was produced by a vacuum cleaner.

What I meant by 'telegraph wire instrument' is an instrument that could imitate the gradually rising tones one hears approaching a telegraph wire, the gradually sinking tones one hears going away from a telegraph wire - in other words, gliding tones.(8)
(Grainger, 1952)

Grainger finally worked at an almost entirely electronic machine, no trace of which now remains, with oscillators to provide the gliding tones. Thus inevitably he came full circle in his endeavours to emulate nature's tones. The synthesizer and the computer were always waiting to be enlisted in the production of sounds that no instrument knows how to play. Grainger's instruments, while ingeniously contrived, were eccentrically constructed, finding new and unusual uses for discarded materials like cotton reels, roller skate wheels, cardboard carpet rolls etc, which produced their engaging Heath Robinson appearance. (For a recording of The Kangaroo Pouch Machine, go to Oz Ad Lib 52).

All kinds of experiments with harmonics, flute tube opening on conical gong. lots of gongs of rich harmonics. perhaps no real harmonies, only harmonics sounding...the timbre to be throbbing, heavily vibrating to pinch one's nerves like huge organ C.

Harp effects strings like a harp with wind blowing through them only sometimes the sound of wind on telegraph wires or perhaps determine the height of sound by strength of the wind not by tuning of the wind not by tuning of the strings,. (9) (sic) (grainger 1901) (See NMA #7 for an interview with Burnett Cross, Graninger's collaborator on the 'Free Music' machines.)

At first glance it might seem that the contemporary Australian sound artist Ernie Althoff has a close affinity with Grainger. They both have made machines out of odd bits and pieces, found objects, industrial and domestic detritus etc. Althoff's machines are however self playing devices which utilise mostly percussive sounds, revolving mobiles in perpetual motion. Recently for PICA at Sound Week in Perth, Althoff created an installation (Coastal Oscillator) whose control mechanism was a 50s oscillating fan. The fan, whose rotating blades had been disabled had strings attached to the fan housing, radiating out from it through 360 degrees. The strings were carefully counterbalanced at their extremities with mobiles of tin foil leaves, drift wood and other littoral percussion objects.

As the fan oscillated, action and counter action produced vibrations at the extremities. This set the objects jangling, as if they were actually being blown by the implied breeze, while the fan's change of compass direction, (prevailing winds, sea breeze, land breeze, etc) induced delicate sounding patterns around the points of the installation's compass. It's a very simple 'southern oscillation index', a gentle reminder that the beating a of a butterfly's wings might well trigger the renowned El Nino effect, with its devastating cycles of drought and flood.

In Ros Bandt's sound art work Mungo, her pentatonically tuned Aeolian harp was actually oriented North-South-East-West so that the four triangular sets of strings (nylon fishing line) radiating from a central pole, might catch whatever breeze prevailed. Erected high on the wind-etched dunes of the Lake Mungo Lunette the harp (first built for the Mildura Sculpture Triennial, 1988) howled eerily throughout the night and whenever a breeze stirred during the day.

To recordings of these wind induced vibrations were later added sounds produced by objects blown across the dunes or uncovered by the winds. Snail shells, kangaroo bones, pebbles, leaves and drifting sand were 'played' by the composer in the recording studio to further sonically embroider the fabric of the piece, and some of the lager bass strings were played by hand. The same winds have carved the twisted sculptural forms from the lakeside deposits in which extremely early Aboriginal remains have been found. Aboriginal elder Alice Kelly of the Mutti Mutti tribe attested to the fact that the harps' sounds seemed to 'reach back into the dreamtime'. (interviewed on site, 1992)

Each of the ground harps has 22 tunable pairs of strings organised in a pentatonic scale, rather like the tuning of a lute. The tuning of all the harp is the same and they tend to vibrate sympathetically. The natural harmonic series is constantly activated by the wind and the overtones coalesce and regroup making the most heavenly and ethereal music imaginable.(10)
(Bandt, 1992)

Another telegraphic by-product-turned-sound-sculpture was Leigh Hobba's installation Whistling Willies, exhibited at the Adelaide Festival Centre Gallery in 1979. Now mostly recycled as fence posts, the hollow demountable poles were used originally to erect telegraphic wires across the Central Australian Desert during the 2nd World War. The telescopic, metallic tubes, manufactured in 1940, have lateral flutes cut into them to reduce weight, but, standing upright, they catch the wind and act as vibrating organ pipes in even a small breeze. In a 20 knot wind they are positively spectral. Their rippling, whistling sounds are well know in the nuclear contaminated Maralinga area of the Central Australian Desert and are the aural equivalent of The Min Min Lights, those phantom illuminations that distract passers by on the NSW North Coast. Leigh Hobba assembled a small stand of the prefabricated poles at Carey Gully before installing them at the Festival Plaza as part of a sound sculpture exhibition

At first glance the flexible plastic tubes of composer Sarah Hopkins might seem like Easter showground kitsch, but finely tuned and choreographed as a kind of air dancing the whirling, corrugated hosing produces overtones and harmonics of astonishing beauty, from the deep whirlies to the high pitched smaller pipes. (She has also made her own Chinese 'Hummers' attached to Kites..another breezy tale or tail.)

In her book on Australian soundsculpture sound artist Ros Bandt lists a whole galaxy of sound sculptural inventions, all of them displaying a continuing fascination with the Australian acoustic environment; a coming to terms with its elements. These works represent an imaginative enquiry into the continent's sonic mysteries. They provide a set of answers to the puzzling questions the Australian soundscape continues to throw up as its heartland is explored and mapped. This unique set of responses from Australia's wind and wire artists could be thought of as a barometer of the sound ecology of the country, and indicates that 'the tuning' of this part of the world, although haphazard, might yet endure the destructive high winds of acoustic degradation that still swirl around us.

Anybody seeking advice on how to make plain vanilla violins into Aeolian violins, should check out The Relative Violins @


Alan Lamb's "wire music" generated by the action of wind on long wires, has become notable as a unique development in new music over the last decade.

The origins of his art go back to the early 1970s during studies for his PhD in Neurophysiology at Edinburgh University. During spare time he was in the habit of building playful kinetic sculptures and he soon began exploring sound sources to add what he felt was the missing sonic dimension to his creations. He discovered the extraordinary musical potential of the amplified upper harmonics of metal wires activated by unconventional means. His "infinite music machines" which use pulsating magnetic fields to vibrate hair-fine tantalum wires carrying electric currents, are a well known example from this period.

He began exploring the musical potential of telegraph wires singing in the wind in the remote Highland regions of the Scottish countryside. On his return to Australia in 1975 he bought from Telecom a one kilometer stretch of abandoned telegraph wires in the Great Southern Outback of Western Australia, and began learning how to record the sounds and making from them the majestic musical compositions for which he is now so well known. His early works, including Primal Image, Night Passage and others, have been released on the Dorobo label. In later work he has continued to explore the medium in collaboration with several artists and composers including Sarah Hopkins, Joan Brassil, Darrin Verhagen and Hannah Clemen.

Lamb's music, sculpture and sound art has appeared in many contexts such as concerts festivals and exhibitions over the last 15 years in Australia and overseas.

His most recent work includes a 6 acre sound installation of wind activated wires (Lamb calls such installations "Wind Organs") to celebrate the opening of SPring 8 in Japan (the world's largest electron synchotron), the Bicentennial Gardens Wind Harp with Joan Brassil in Campbelltown, Sydney, and the Wogarno Station Wind Organ, a permanent installation to enhance tourism in the mid-west outback of Western Australia.

At present he is working with Hannah Clemen to develop a music from the human encephalogram with the aim of developing a "music created by nothing more than meditation".
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