amphora resonating to traffic w microphone, O+A 1991
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TRAFFIC
MANTRA, ROME 1991
In
Rome in 1992, O+A made a sound
installation in support of Peter Erskine's solar spectrum work, Secrets
of the Sun. The amazingly rich visual aesthetic of the Trajan's Forum
site with its famous proto-Roman arched Aula by the architect
Apollodoris was, to our ears, completely over-ridden by the bombardment
of the noise of Rome traffic passing by on the busy Via 4 Novembre.
Trajans Forum had now become a band shell for amplifying Fiats
and Vespas. Rather than escalate and add a still louder sound of our
own, we decided to use this ever-present 20th century sound as our basic
material and to seek a method of transforming it.
An exploration of the available sound resources at the site included
dropping a stereo mic into a Roman Amphora. While the sound inside the
amphora was as all the bells of Rome ringing, on withdrawing the mic
it was merely traffic noise. This clay vessel from slave-powered Rome
had become in our fossil-fueled century an acoustically-activated
synthesizer, trapping and resonating the tones of the traffic into a
complex pool of shifting harmonics. Low tones of busses would activate
a deep fundamental, passing Vespas would make high overtone chords,
emergency sirens became solo melodic voices when heard within the echoing
clay confines. We secured permission from the archeologist in charge
of the Forum to use some of the vessels, and then chose for our use
four out of about two-hundred and fifty amphorae, each of which had
a different character to its overtone series.We used the traffic sound
resonating inside the amphorae, filtered it, amplified it, and projected
back in real-time, on-site, a musically tuned version of the urban noise.
We chose as our focal point the archway over the old Roman road which
was once used as a main entrance to the Forum. There we hung a single
ceramic "Planet Speaker," powered by solar panels. The speakers
focused beam of tuned traffic resonance played across the curved surfaces
of the old Roman architecture and transformed the sonic ambiance in
a harmonic way. What we could not have foreseen is that, at the exact
time the "Traffic Mantra" began to play, an atmosphere of
calm descended on the international crew of workers who, up to that
point, had been arguing avidly in many languages.
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