In the 20th Century, the speaker has arguably been the most influential musical instrument in popular music. From the limitations on form it places on the stadium rock event creating specific sonic domains available to the massively popular artist, to the origins of soundsystem culture via the reggae/dub phenomenon of Jamaica and club dj culture stretched out towards rave culture. The unhidden frame of the contemporary soundwork can be seen to be the technical possibilities of speaker technology. How loud, how discrete, how varied, how subtle, how much spectrum can your voice or your instruments dominate or utalise as canvas. Is the instrument a cultural or political tool? Does it enhance you or direct your ideas and knowledge? Can you tell the difference between the shape of your voice and how your voice has been shaped?
It is no surprise then to find artists focused on the nature and form of amplification as the central focus of their work. New York performer Lesley Flanigan creates the feedback loop between the sound event and the tools that create the event utalising microphones and speakers to create both tones and patterns of actual feedback along with vocal layered patterns. Her speakers are handmade and contain internal microphones (piezos), amplifying circuits, switches and potentiometers (pots). By themselves they suggest a minimal starkness akin to a mix of Japanese and Northern European design, smooth clean lines deftly hiding the high technology within their discrete wooden forms. The other instrument she wields is her voice, which while having been trained as a soprano has moved away towards an ‘organic’/natural/original encapsulation of her voice. To dally in the many questions that this act envisages, even it’s questionable possibility would take up some peoples lifetimes. Suffice to say that her voice attenuated by technology becomes multilayered and varied in tone and form, beyond the naturalistic assumption towards an extended possible. It conjures up echoes of Elizabeth Frasier and can be compared to contemporary vocalists such as Mara Carlyle.
The form of Amplifications is very much the sense of sound sculpture, revealing her sculpture training at Ringling College of Art and Design as well as her media training at New York University. Carving sound into forms through technology and strategy, while maintaining a glimmer of the song as form creating a bridge between traditional and experimental concepts. Just a brief foray into her chosen instrumentation reveals the depth of knowledge in electrical engineering, mathematics and the science of sound that is encapsulated in this display of a seemingly effortless and ethereal display. It obviously is a highly disciplined art and science to arrive at a transient sonic space that suggests in sound both a transient and eternal tapestry.
Innerversitysound
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