Vertical Acoustics (2017)

Music for piano wire, drone, and an aluminum pendulum plumb.

Fort Tilden is a concrete structure at a former WWI military site on the beaches of Queens, in the Rockaways, New York. The area is now a popular site to visit for recreational purposes. The generally calm soundscape of the ocean site coexists with the visually brutalist concrete structure of the gun case mates, the only reminder of the noises and blasts of WWI war instruments once housed by the camouflaged casemates. The sound instrument with drone, piano wire and pendulum plumb was used on one occasion to capture and enhance the soundscape of the abandoned military site near the Atlantic Ocean to introduce the hum of the drone into the soundscape of the de-militarized area.

Residency Unlimited is a Brooklyn based artist-in-residence program that I participated in 2017. The refurbished space of the former South Congregational Church hosts the residency. The acoustically challenging space of the church's interior was the key element of the performance I made from the drone, the piano wire, and the pendulum. The space became the acoustic body for my new instrument, which was able to resonate, refract, and scatter sound frequencies across the walls of the church, collaborating in the emergence of a ‘voice’ from the building. The performance was part of an open studio event organized by Residency Unlimited and it was realized with the support of TMU and ACAX from Hungary.