Recent visitor to our shores Japanese field recordist Toshiya Tsunoda is renowned for his desire to record the minute vibrations of sound, having previously recorded the likes of motion of air within a glass bottle. On Scenery of Decalcomania Tsunoda suggests that “an event causes vibrations through a certain space, and the vibrations affect this space.” Tsunoda’s interest is in documenting this altered space and in order to do this he sets up a few little experiments for himself and then enthusiastically records the results. Thus armed with three glass bottles, three vibration plates and sine waves he creates a miniature symphonic hum that is gradually overcome by the pitches of the pure sine waves on the opener Unstable Contact. Then there’s Wind Whistling, where he records the sound of the wind whistling through a narrow slit in the handrail of a footbridge, the pitch changing according to the strength of the wind, sounding like a gentler higher pitched companion to Alan Lamb’s infamous wind on powerlines experiments. Elsewhere he records a narrow cavity under a cylinder resulting in a watery drone replete with nearby bird calls, the sound of a nearby ferry, the almost calming drones recorded from the opening of a pipe, plus other more complex experiments involving oscillators and sine waves. Tsunoda strength is his desire to focus on the microsim of tiny sounds often overlooked or impossible to hear with the human ear. His recordings are less about static representations of environments than on how the impact of an outside force irrevocably changes a space.
Bob Baker Fish
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