This initial phase developed my understanding of how vibration sounds, and may be captured, challenged my approach to music-based vibration, and helped direct my focus to the making of ambient low frequency sound and vibration.
I started to enhance, emulate and set up natural processes of low frequency sound in space. Field recordings and music-based experiments with a large PA worked towards a composition, which tested some boundaries around referencing riddim, and music-based vibration response.
The first phase was field recordings of music-based vibration, taken from around nightclubs. My goal was to take recordings that most literally highlighted the nature of musical vibration.
Although the recordings contained good examples of vibration, I felt that the overall sound was too obviously taken from a nightclub/music context to be of use. When listening back, the other musical elements were very predominant over the vibration.
Next I conducted recordings around the Merri Creek, because I felt it was an area that although the activity of people was relatively low, that the presence of urban activity and technology was present in low frequency sound.
I sought to find locations where low frequency sound was a dominant characteristic, such as an electrical substation, under bridges that resonated from the energy of vehicles, and from under a train station, capturing the arrival and departure of trains. I wanted these recordings to find ways of expressing the inherent potential for vibration that was contained within low frequency energy.
After the experience of being unable to record environmental musical vibration without too much music interference, I set my mind to ways of emulating this experience and focusing on the characteristics of musical vibration that were of most interest to me.
I generated content by looping a drum and bass bassline, and applied processing to try to filter and abstract the explicit musical aspects of it. I then played the processed sound within a space, through a large PA, and recorded the effect this had on the space.
Recordings from this were further processed, such as through time stretching and layering, to further abstract from the notable sense of rhythmic pattern still underpinning the source material. The ambient recordings were also incorporated, to conclude a preliminary composition work.
This period explored two of my principal research aims:
It concluded with work drawing on musical and environmental vibration. The main findings were as follows.
From field recordings, I had a better understanding of how vibration sounds, is created and relates to low frequency stimulus, and how to record it. I realised its complexity and the limitations and challenges if trying to emulate it through software.
I tested heavy bass content with a large PA soundsystem, and compared the ‘live' experience of being in a PA activated space, to recordings of this space. It was clear that much of the ‘live' experience wouldn't translate to recording and reproduction.
Considering that the other artists I knew of working in the area were using large PA in performance to create vibration, I resolved that for my research I wanted to create sense of the vibration in spaces without reliance on big PA setups – to create a more internalised and translatable experience, as my focus was the perception and range of ‘vibration' in materials rather than the present sound/space relationship of a live performance. This thinking helped direct later research.
Using music based recordings, I employed many techniques to blur riddim but the musical link/pattern remained. This presented an ongoing a challenge and made me consider what viable alternate approaches I could use to heavy bass generation.
Use of more ambient material opened up the creative process and helped explore the idea that vibration potential is inherent within materials, subject to low frequency stimulus.
Research detail subpage: 1.1 - Abstraction of “riddim” – basslines moving from musical to environmental