Electroacoustic feedback is one of many standard techniques in the bag of tricks of the experimental musician and a staple of sound art installations engaging with media specificities. Its allure lies in its simplicity: any electroacoustic chain composed of microphone, amplifier, speaker and elastic medium can be easily used to produce pure tones. Adam Basanta’s The Sound of Empty Space is a group of object-theatre miniatures that propose three different compositional solutions for this technique. Pirouette features a microphone slowly rotating on a revolving table between a circle of loudspeaker cones fixed in space. As the microphone passes by each speaker, a different feedback tone is produced, generating a sequence of tones transcribed from the main theme of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. Circular motion is replaced by linear motion in Vessel. Here one speaker and one microphone are placed in a jar in the manner of a model galleon. The distance between the two elements, and thus their resonating frequency, is changed by moving the speaker closer or further from the microphone, as in the action of the piston in a trombone. The loudest sound in the room experienced very quietly presents the viewer with a PA system enclosed in a soundproof aquarium. Inside the aquarium a sound level meter measures an intensity at the threshold of pain. Outside the transparent casing, this ear splitting sound is barely audible. Modulating the spatial relationships between speaker, microphone and the observer, these three pieces establish a unity of content and form that is experienced through the performativity of the materials employed. Matteo Marangoni

 

Adam Basanta – The Sound of Empty Space