Memory Space is a sound sculpture that projects the cumulative past into the current moment.
The room that holds the piece is constantly recorded using a microphone. Once an hour has passed,
this recording will begin to be played back through speakers located adjacent to the recorded space.
After another hour passes, the previous hour will begin to play superimposed on the previous. This
process will continue, with each layer adding to the pile. Once the 23rd hour has been recorded,
the buffer will play the final culmination of sound recorded, and flush, starting anew, and playing
back a new set of recorded sounds through the speakers.
Context
When one finds themself in a space that has clearly been inhabited before, one naturally
begins to wonder what may have taken place in this space before them. “If these walls could
talk” is a saying often used to state that the private goings on in a space are scandalous or
sinful enough to be worthy of a domicile confession. My piece aims to convert the space in
which it is installed into a space whose walls can recite the happenings before.
The chief practical influence on this work is Terry Riley’s All Night Flights. Coming out of
the Music Concrete scene of the 40s and 50s, Terry popularized the technique of stringing tape
between two machines, and creating music out of the resulting repetition. The first time he used
this technique was to score a play by Ken Dewey called The Gift in 1960. This piece was
comprised of recordings of Chet Baker’s Band combined with delay style effects produced by
this two machine setup which he had dubbed the Time Lag Accumulator. Riley began staging
performances called All Night Flights which were solo performance concerts which spanned
entire nights, wherein Terry improvises on the keyboard, saxophone and time lag accumulator.
Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band, and A Rainbow In Curved Air are two pieces based on
excerpts of these performances and demonstrate nicely how the layers in such a system stack
up.
Another sound piece that is echoed by this project is I am Sitting in a Room by Alvin
Lucier. In this piece Lucier sits in a room, with a tape recorder, a speaker, and a microphone,
and says “I am sitting in a room, the same one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my
speaking voice.” The recording is then played back into the room, and consequently recorded
by the microphone, and recorded onto the tape, played by the speaker, and so on. The result is
a recording that slowly begins to fade in favor of the resonant frequencies particular to the
space in which the piece is performed/played. As the sound is processed over and over,
Lucier’s words begin to fade and the echoes of it are amplified. This piece is a good
counterexample to Memory Space because it involves a strikingly similar setup with an opposite
aim. Where I am Sitting in a Room is focused on the idiosyncratic sound of the room itself, with
the object of removing the original sound of the participant, this is a phenomenon Memory
Space aims to minimize, to allow observers to focus on the theme of memory and what has
happened in the room rather than the room’s particular feelings on the matter.
Another piece that has a similar theme to Memory Space is Jim Campbell’s
Memory/Recollection. This piece records still images of those in front of the piece. Over time
these still images begin to appear on the screens in a left to right order, and begin to get noisier
as they do so. This piece seems to be primarily a meditation on memory itself, and its inherently
faulty mechanisms which is very much a theme contained inside Memory Space. However
Memory Space is less concerned with the mechanisms of memory themself, and is more
concerned with confronting the observers of those who have experienced the space before
them, and hopefully consider what they might hear if it were installed at the bus stop, or in their
local grocery store, or near their favorite public bench.
Process
The internal ‘brain’ of the piece is a max patch that simulates a tape-based technique
developed in the early 20th century for creating feedback and delay style effects. The original
technique consisted of two tape machines with tape strung between both, with one machine
recording to the tape, and the other playing it back. This setup allowed performers to create
effects that would eventually evolve into aspects of music that we now take for granted such as
echo, delay, reverb, live looping, and many more. The max patch of this piece essentially
simulates this setup if one were to place the tape machines an “hour” apart(roughly 2400 feet).
The max patch is based heavily on the final max patch in the paper Loops in MSP by Peter
Elsea.
A major hurdle to overcome was how to prevent the microphone from picking up the sound of the speakers
and begin feeding back into itself. This was ultimately solved by placing the speakers adjacent to the space
being observed, and projecting the sound in the opposite direction of the microphone so that minimal leakage occurs.
The microphone choice played a role as well, going with a cardiod semi-omnidirectional microphone(Shure sm57). This
choice allowed the microphone to pick up the majority of sound in front of and to the sides of it, but ignore any sound coming
from the opposite direction it was facing. ie. where the speakers are.
