How does sound move?


Affected by your presence, a rope creates physical 3D waves floating in front of you, hitting your perception as sound and light at once.

The installation reacts to those who watch it. When the audience moves around it they influence the movements of the rope, generating visual and acoustic sound waves from harmonic patterns to complex ones.
DanielPalacios_Waves_Pattern -1

Depending on how we may act in front of it, according to the number of observers and their movements, it will pass from a steady line without sound to chaotic shapes of irregular sounds (the more movement there is around the installation) through the different phases of sinusoidal waves and harmonic sounds; examining the action-reaction principle applied to sound and space.

Waves utilizes sound as a mechanism to think about how our presence influences the space around us.

The installation uses two motors to oscillate a length of rope creating a visual reminiscent of a digital waveform while creating it’s own whipping hum from the motion of the rope cutting through the air.

But even though this could seem like a mere representation of what we can’t see by ourselves, it connects with our most visceral side, combining the intangible beauty of the represented graphic with the brutality of the sound it produces, creating a hypnotic environment of audible results and unique visual stimulations.

Due to its particular features, a space has a way of relating with sound, understanding sound as a series of compressions and decompressions which move through the air, so that the geometry of the space itself and the elements in it will influence the movements of the sound and finally our perception of it; adding to this entire stationary system a chaos of infinite variables from the most minimal movement on our part, the installation examines how we interpret our own position in a sonic landscape.

DanielPalacios_Waves_Engine view

Nonetheless, it is the intangible, the process it creates, which provides sense to the space it occupies

It establishes a relationship with the public, who begin to discover that their movements have an influence on the space and its sounds, alternating states of great agitation with others when they stop to see how the wave disappears in space like a whistle in the wind.