Low Frequency Studies 2

VISIT 2008
Broadstone Studios (Dublin, Ireland)

Low Frequency Studies 2 explores the relationship between low-frequency vibration present in urban housing structures and the sexual / bodily experience of these structures' inhabitants.

Presented as part of the VISIT 2008 open-studio exhibition at Broadstone Studios, this installation invited audience members to sit at a desk and place their hands on a vibrating subwoofer placed in front of an LCD monitor. As their hands began to vibrate, a live video feed displaying their fingers appeared on the monitor. The audience also put on headphones playing a series of low frequency tones related to the tones passing through the subwoofer on the table.

The vibration in the video feed was exaggerated within the installation's software so that it displayed a montage of fingers scattering across the screen and fragmenting themselves into an overlapping multiplicity of form. A second layer of video consisting of fragments of text documenting personal sexual experiences recalled from living in a vibration-prone apartment building in 2005 was superimposed over the video feed, jumping between different lines of text so quickly that only certain words could be deciphered over time.

This installation forms a response to a short excerpt of text from a lecture given by Raymond Murray Schafer (the author of The World Soundscape Project and founder of the discipline of Acoustic Ecology) at the opening of the Sensing the City exhibition at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in 2006. Schafer muses on the question: "Are cities noisier now than they were in 1970 when we did the study of the Vancouver soundscape?", and states:

"My own subjective reply to that question would be to say probably not; but there has been a shift to lower frequencies, and infrasound. The noise generated by the physical plant of all new buildings is significantly higher than that in older buildings. This seems to be an issue that has been ignored by both architects and acoustical engineers who in my experience are remarkably deaf. We don't really know the consequences of those deep vibrations with which we are being forced to live. Do they stimulate our sexual appetites or calm them?"

Low Frequency Studies 2 was designed using VVVV and Pure Data. It is the second in a series of Low Frequency works, the first of which involves modulating low frequency tones between small transducers mounted over audience members' hearts and an array of subwoofers that fill a performance space with a strong physical / spatial vibration (blurring the boundaries between bodily and architectural space).