Sonic Garbage

Sonic Garbage is a sound art installation accompanied by a single performance. It is a multichannel piece which is built using the choroechoic compositional technique. This technique has been developed by the artist and initially introduced at the piece Wunderkammer: Sound cabinet of curiosities, which was presented at the Audio Forensics sound art show in 2008 at IMT Gallery in London.

The piece Sonic Garbage is inspired by the idea of recycled materials that are used for artistic and not only purposes. It is an effort to appreciate those unwanted artifacts for their aural qualities. The useless becoming useful, the ugly duckling turning into a swan, recycling materials used in a creative way, and parallelism of isolated individuals who reclaim their role within society, are just a few interpretations of such an artwork yet the aim of the artist is to provide the opportunity to the audience to decide which way they would like to appreciate the piece.

The installation itself is minimal in regards to visual elements as the purpose of the piece is to trigger the aural awareness of the audience. Eight active loudspeakers will be positioned within the provided space taking advantage of the architecture and following compositional rules in regards to characteristics of the sounds; high pitched 'thin' sounds will be higher in space rather than 'heavy' base sounds so that in a way space itself works as an stave and the objects as notes.

The single performance which will take place during the opening day of the exhibition will be a live demonstration of recycling sonic garbage and creating a concrete composition using these materials. Due to the importance of the meaning of acousmatics, the artist will perform the piece behind a curtain, or blindfolds will be provided to the audience. This suggests that the important element is the sounding result rather than the image or the activity of the performer. This way the audience will be encouraged to focus on the listening experience since the visual elements will have been minimized.

The performance will be recorded live and then reproduced at the gallery space through a headphone system and will be on exhibition for as long as the installation will be in a separate section. The purpose is to demonstrate the use of sonic garbage in a creative way in both space (installation) and time (performance-recording) dependent formats.

Sonic Garbage (stereo adaptation) by Sonologik

On Choroechoic Composition

During my university years I conducted a research trying to find the means through which sound objects, as the are defined by Pierre Schaefer, can be treated for exhibition as actual tangible objects.

The main difference between an object sonore and a physical one is the factor of time. A physical object once positioned and left alone somewhere, is timeless. It stands there showcasing its attributes. On the contrary, sound is time dependent. It has an onset, duration and an offset, therefore it seems that by following the laws of physics, an effort to treat a sound object as a tangible one on exhibition would be in vain.

Yet an artist undertakes sometimes the role of an illusionist. If the illusion that a sound object is timeless can be created, then the purpose of the research will be successful.

I created an algorithm in max/msp which plays back random parts of a sample and crossfades them with each other, then it is directing them to one single output. The audible result is a sound object that is always there at a specific position in space but it never ends or repeats itself in a loop thus acquiring the sense of time. Lets not forget that time is the result of a periodic gesture.

When a sound object has gone through this process it is being turned into a Choroechon (Choros in greek means space and Echos means sound).

Choroechoic composition is the compositional strategy and procedure which uses Choroecha in order to create a spacial artwork of sounds in the same manner a visual artists creates a composition in space out of tangible objects.

This procedure will be used to create an installation using choroecha that are produced by the unwanted artefacts or sonic garbage that have been mentioned below.