Case Study 1


This part of the exposition discusses "Motet" a paradoxical "silent sound installation", presented at the Tampere Biennale in April 2018. The exposition accounts the genesis of the piece through a dialogue between the artist and a technological object, the loudspeaker.


The process leading to "Motet" can be thought to constitute a textbook illustration of an artistic contextualisation of Lévi-Strauss' bricolage, showing how a new, artistically meaningful structure arose from an interaction with a very simple set of objects and events.






The dialogue with the speakers started: I mapped useful frequencies and the resulting range was from 2 to 16 Hertz, corresponding to the frequencies where the speakers would respond to signals by moving effectively in silence. Below 2Hz the movement was too slow to be visually meaningful in this context, and above 16 hertz one started to perceive a "proto-sound". I also trialed various loudspeaker designs and models, as well as amplifiers.

As the trials evolved, I developed a repertoire of effective waveforms and frequencies, adapted to the speaker that had the most visually engaging response. The speakers were multiplied, first up to five speakers. A technique for composing sub-audio waveshapes and patterns was developed, using max/MSP and standard digital audio workstation technology. With these tools, it became possible to "write" movement for an array of speakers, and systematically experiment with rhythms and patterns, as well as different compositional figures such as unisonos and solos in the movement domain.


Further exploration was made in cooperation with the choreographer Satu Tuomisto, who's input involved translating choreographic vocabulary of human group movement composition to the speakers: subdivisions into smaller groups, counterpoints and dramaturgy between stillness and movement.


I was then proposed to exhibit the loudspeaker installation at the Tampere Biennale, within a large space at the Galleria Himmelblau. The availability of an almost-monumental space brought the need for scaling up the piece. From 5 speakers the installation passed to 32 speakers, with a custom-made 12 meters long table by Juhana Nyrhinen. Further funding was sought and granted, enabling favourable economic conditions for upscaling the piece. "Motet" found its final form through the set up at Galleria Himmelblau, as documented in the video on top of this page.


Bricolage of art and technology

The process of "Motet" stems from a technological incident towards an established sound art installation. In Lévi-Strauss' terms: the work proceeds from objects and events towards structure.

The founding moment is the appearance of a salient, unexpected behaviour in a familiar object. With dismay and amusement, I would then replicate the behaviour, investigate its nature and scope, "discover what it could signify" (Lévi-Strauss, 1966), with a firm intuition that the event is poetically pregnant.

Motivated by the initial discovery, I then set off to structure the objects (loudspeakers) and events (kinetic behaviour) into a meaningful structure - a sound art installation. The process is guided by the physical characteristics and constraints of the speakers, amplifiers and software, I found myself to personify Lévi Strauss' bricoleur, who  "speaks with things" as well as "through things", "giving an account of his personality through the choices he makes between the limited possibilities" (ibid.).

For "Motet", there was no initial vision, sketch or plan for a piece, just a fortuitous incident setting off a process. The piece grew from the events and materials available, their inherent constraints and possibilities, favourable economic conditions, a possibility to expose at a festival, as well as through cooperation. At the heart of this process is an attitude attuned to working in dialogue with the situation, which finds full resonance with Lévi-Strauss' concept of resonance.

Upon the opening of the exhibition at the Tampere Biennale, it became obvious that the bricolage would continue on the reception side of the piece. The array of silent, "dancing" loudspeakers became the canvas where the public would project their imagination, some seeing breathing, human organs, robots, specific meaningful moments (like the memory of being hospitalised that one member of public brought up). The result of the my bricolage - a structured set of events and objects - would spark up structures of meaning in the public, fulfilling Lévi-Strauss' definition of bricolage: "the signified changes into the signifying, and vice versa" (ibid.).



Motet, silent audio installation for 32 loudspeakers



The piece has its origins in a serendipitous observation of an unexpected behaviour of a loudspeaker in the context of a contemporary dance creation. While rehearsing for Sanna Myllylahti's piece "I will tell you when I am ready" in 2016, I accidentally drove sub-audio frequencies to an array of loudspeakers without encasing. My à priori assumption was that the amplifiers would feature a high-pass filter, preventing any sub-audio frequencies to arrive to the speakers, or that the speakers would not respond to low frequency signals.


Partly due to the simplicity and low quality of the equipment (ex. cheap amplifiers did not have any filtering implemented), the speakers did respond, moving in different patterns shaped by the input signals, but without emitting any sound.


Immediately, I was struck by the poetic paradox: the paradigmatic sound-object of our era became a silent, moving object. There was a mental translation of sound to movement. The loudspeaker acquired qualities of movement, rhythm, intensity, and became animate. The animated character further fueled imagination towards automatic, or even animal movement.

Video documentation of "Motet" at Tampere Biennale 2018

Note on loudspeakers and sound art

As a piece of sound art, "Motet" integrates a long tradition of loudspeaker-based artworks. The loudspeaker constitutes the iconic herald of electronic music; it is the medium that makes electronic sounds possible. Thus it is hardly surprising that the loudspeaker has caught central attention in the sound-related arts. Classic examples of loudspeaker works comprise, for example, Bernhard Leitner's "ton" series (starting in 1971), exploring spatial arrangements of loudspeaker arrays, without enclosure, as well as Gordon Monahan's "Speaker swinging" (1982) which explored and contributed to establish the instrumentality of the "naked" simple speaker. "Motet" positions itself in regard to this tradition, by proposing a paradoxal nullification of the loudspeaker's sonic function, thus contributing to explore yet another thread of this multifaceted cultural object.

An early version of Motet, for five speakers

The sound design for Sanna Myllylahti's piece "I will tell you when I am ready" (Zodiak, 2016) already featured moving loudspeaker cones as a counterpoint to the dance.

Motet is a silent audio installation for dancing speakers. The work builds a paradox at the interface of sound and movement: the loudspeakers are driven with infrasound frequencies that are not audible to human ears but manifests itself as a series of hypnotic movements.

In collaboration with choreographer Satu Tuomisto.

Tampere Biennale
Galleria Himmelblau, 31.3.-15.4.2018

Video: Ville-Veikko Heinonen / Alasin Media