inprogress
meadowpiano
(imaging & sonifcations)
holographic sonification
The Meadow
Piano , a kind of extended and updated
Aeolian harp, sits in a large, relatively flat
meadow space and is itself 1/16th mile long by 1/8th mile wide.
Its horizontal planes (only one is shown in the model), arranged
in layers from three feet to three hundred feet above ground,
are made up of stainless steel strands of varying diameters; these
accomplish an imaging process both audible (by means means of
flat response transducers) and visual (through slow scan video)
of snow, sleet, hail, rain and mist. The diagonal strands sense
soft or gusty surface winds. The bottommost layer or grid gives
a readout, again both audible and visually, of the complex thermal
variations within the terrain, rising heat eddies, and the earth's
ambient magnetism.
There are touch sounds of raindrops amd snow drops
and non touch sounds of concussive thunder and cricket choruses.
Insect steps across the strands and the activity of spiders building
night webs between strands is available for sensing and recording,
as well as the approach of cold or warm fronts. The sudden interrution
of light and heat caused by a passing cloud shadow is both seeable
and hearable. This is in addition to what the ear might normally
garner from the surface cusion sounds of a meadow: the grass whooshings,
grasshoppers, redwinged blackbirds, bob-o-links, and snakes in
the grass.
Some of these sensed meadow facets can be isolated,
and all sounds can be intermixed; in the master control room,
the operator of the Meadow Piano can both tune the individual
strands and choose particular sounds, as they occur, and personally
organize sound. LB writing in YONY, School
of the Art Institute, Sonia
Landy Sheridan and Keith Smith, Co-Editors, 1975-76
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