String Section is an installation of long wires deployed as both a means of acoustic excitation and the simplest analog measure of an architectural distance. The work consists of an array of speakers suspended from resonant wires that span the vertical dimension of their enclosing room. These speakers both excite and amplify the strings from which they are suspended, generating recirculating feedback signals. The system also amplifies and unfolds vibrations in the materials of the building. The result is a positive feedback loop whose behavior is influenced by the dimensions of the space, ambient vibrations in the materials of the edifice, gauge and tension of the string, as well as the division of the string via custom-made bridges. These bridges deform under the tension of the string and house the surface microphones that are fed back into the speakers.
This feedback system accumulates material vibrations and draws our attention to architectural sounds that are often considered symptomatic of poor design or entropy. Diachronic creaks and groans from the architectural site are recirculated and grow into synchronic masses of noise. Prolonging and accumulating these sounds brings them into our field of attention, awakening them from what Christoph Cox calls the sonic unconscious.
String Section was made possible through a Research Through Making Grant
from the Taubman School of Architecture at the University of Michigan
and presented at:
Research Through Making Exhibition, Liberty Lofts Gallery, Ann Arbor, 2017.
37th Annual Conference of the Association for Computer Aided Design
in Architecture. MIT, 2017.
Grand Opening of the new A. Alfred Taubman Wing of Taubman College, 2017.
Smartgeometry conference at the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, University of
Toronto, 2018.
‘Unrecordables’ concert at Wayne State University with Joo Won Park, 2019.