The Magic Hour

This week I am mostly managing all the physical elements of the installation, such as the cabling and the waterproof housing for the bat detectors.  Today, for example, I have 200 or so metres of audio cable to prepare, in order to connect all my pieces of equipment together.

My Echolocation is just about completed, in the sense that there’s not actually that much more that I can do to it until I go the Botanic Garden next week to fine tune it to the evening bat behaviour.

So, it’s out with the soldering iron, the screwdriver, an assortment of plugs and adaptors and cable galore….  My wish is to do absolutely everything that I can do in preparation before my visit, so that when I arrive I can concentrate on the finer detail.

Ideally, I would like my Echolocation sound installation to not only be musically interesting, but also ‘readable’ in terms of being able to know what the bats are doing, simply by listening.  This is actually quite a challenge!

In order to achieve this I will have to have some sort of correlation between the bat detectors picking up the sounds and the sounds used in the composition itself.  I am thinking that, for example, I might be able to achieve this through careful use of spatialisation (to refer to the locations of the actual bat detectors) as well as through the use of various threshold detectors (to respond to the variance in speed and volume of the different bat species’ calls).

As well as my Predator and Echolocation sound installations, I am also exhibiting some pieces that have previously been created for the Hannah Peschar Sculpture Garden, in Surrey.  These compositions take as their starting point the dna and amino acid sequences of plants in that garden, and the two that I am going to use for Magic Hour are derived from the genetic data of the gunnera and bamboo plants.

The Gunnera composition takes its inspiration from the plant’s chloroplast gene (which converts sunlight into energy for growth).  Referencing the plant’s origin (the cloud forests of the Andes) the music makes use of a panpipe sound to play amino acid sequences connected with the leaves’ photosynthesis whilst being accompanied by a faster moving dan sequence highlighting the plants prickly surface.

The Bamboo composition is based on genetic data for the shape of the plant’s leaves (the Liguleless3 gene).  Using sounds created to sound like bamboo wood pieces hitting against each other, the music gives the illusion of a giant bamboo wind chime casually playing the plant’s dana, as if it was being blown by a gentle breeze.  (Interestingly, perhaps, no amino acid sequences were used in this particular composition as according to the genetic databases that I was using, scientists hadn’t yet published this aspect of the plant.  Thus, in a way, the composition also reflects the advances of science at this time).

Today all the artists and gardeners met with the OCM team to give everyone an update on how each and everyone’s pieces were coming along.  We walked through the garden, pausing at various stages whilst the relevant art piece (to be) was explained and discussed. It was good to get an overview of what eventually will be happening, especially as often on these occasions one can be so focused that it is difficult to see one’s work in its wider context.

It was a good day, well spent, with a lot of practical matters discussed and dealt with.   It was also good to feel the group coming together and bonding better as a team.

I have now collected almost all the equipment I will need for my Echolocation sound installation, and am now trying to work out how to put it all together!  In the meantime I have been working with recordings that I have previously made of the bats at different points along the River Cherwell, which runs alongside the Botanic Garden.

I am creating this piece using Symbolic Sound’s Kyma Sound Design Language, which allows me to create a series of virtual instruments that the bats will ‘play’ as they fly past and emit their ultrasonic calls.  Although I am working with recordings of bats from the Botanic Garden that I made only a few weeks ago, it is still difficult to predict exactly how the piece will sound at the Magic Hour event.  One of the reasons for this is that, at this stage, I have no idea as to what the bat activity will be like by the time we get to September, although I am imagining there will be more of them as I am assuming that their young will also be out foraging by then.  Fortunately, my Kyma system is powerful enough for me to be able to keep the piece ‘live’, meaning that it should be easy enough to make adjustments to all the different parameters even on the performance nights themselves.  That’s the plan, anyway….