On the 28th of May I attended the opening of the Real-Fake exhibition at the Art University of Linz (Kunstuniversität Linz). I developed the sound design to my friend Letitia Lehner’s installation All Our Lives Are Symbols which was part of the exhibition. The piece is an ambitious attempt to represent the symbolic in both the visual and audio realms. My contribution was to compose sound for 4 different abstract graphic symbols, which each sound somehow signifying the visual in some way. The installation setup consisted of four turntables playing back 7″ vinyl records of each of the 4 sound pieces I had designed. Above each turntable sat a record case with a printed insert depicting the symbol that was used as inspiration for the sound. The end result was meant to be an abstract tension between the visual and auditory, a kind of symbolic synthaesthesia. Here’s my rough translation of the german from the website:
A graphical and auditory interpretation of the fictitious symbolic language »SYNCHISIA SYMBOLS« – an international art project by the scottish artist Ryan Hays. Information is being constantly mediated in syntactic, semantic and pragmatic ways. »ALL OUR LIVES ARE SYMBOLS« is a purely aesthetic and formalistic formulation, which the concept of language highlights ad absurdum.
Obviously difficult to imagine this without the audio and symbols, however here’s one rendering of the symbols which I used as inspiration:
For the first symbol, an inverted “V”, I created a periodic ramping, sound, as of someone breathing or a wave breaking and receding on a shore.
For the second, the pyramid, I created a solid foundation to the piece in the form of a low frequency bass sequence effected by some phase distortion to give an eerie touch. To me, the pyramid reflected strength, power and stability.
For the third, the triangle-circle, I created a rhythmic, clicking, looping sound that was both circular (cyclic) and triangular (ramping up and down in amplitude).
For the final symbol, the circle, I used an effected recording of my finger moving in circles around the rim of a half filled wine glass, creating at atmospheric resonant ringing sound.