Adventures in Electroacoustic Performance
“As a person rocks back and forth in the chair, a mercury switch senses its position,” Bobrowski says. “The switch data is translated into a MIDI message, which is fed into the HMSL program on the Mac. That, in turn, triggers samples of my grandmother speaking while simultaneously fading the speaker volume up and down. There’s a nice interaction between the voice and the chair. My grandmother has a very high voice with a thick accent, which blended really well with the squeaks of the chairs.”
The “grandmother chair” is the most technically complex rocker of the group. “The other chairs are more simple in that the rocking motion merely raised and lowered the volume of a long loop as it played,” Bobrowski says. “The loops have an inherent rhythm to them. When the rhythm of the rockers was superimposed as volume changes over the loops, interesting moiré patterns resulted.”
She dedicated a different chair to her father. That chair rocks on amplified nuts and bolts while playing recordings of Bobrowski’s father singing lullabies over the phone. Still another, the “news chair,” plays sound bites from a talk-radio station while rocking on amplified newspaper. Not surprisingly, Bobrowski dedicated the chair to friends who obsessively listen to the news.
The “rap chair” rocks on an amplified car hood, which triggers rap beats as it creaks and thuds on the hood’s uneven surface. Bobrowski immersed another rocker in a pool of amplified water, accompanied by an ocean soundtrack.
The smallest chair is a child’s rocker, which sits on a speaker. Rocking the chair triggers loud squeaks that are pitch-shifted down until they sound like violins and cellos. “Although it was the smallest chair in the room, it was the loudest,” Bobrowski says. “But you couldn’t sit in it. You had to push it with your hand.”
Bobrowski put on a performance version of Rock On called Rock Her at the Alternative Museum in New York City. For that incarnation, she choreographed a quartet of performers in prepared rocking chairs.
Right As Rain
Bobrowski feeds on the challenge of creating site-specific pieces, and she enjoys working in large sonorous spaces. The Chapel of the Chimes—a beautiful columbarium in Oakland, California, designed by architect Julia Morgan—is one such environment.
For Playing Rain, Bobrowski uses a dozen brass flower vases that are scattered throughout the columbarium. As visitors pour water through the vases, the liquid drips onto plates with piezo triggers strategically placed underneath to sense the droplets. The piezos are connected to a Roland PM16 pad-to-MIDI interface that sends input data to a Mac for triggering samples of gamelan instruments. “The first time I heard gamelan music, it reminded me of rain,” Bobrowski says. “I used gamelan samples in this piece because of their chimelike quality, which seemed to fit the theme of the performance environment.
“The water droplets trigger samples with randomized pitches in a Javanese tuning system,” Bobrowski says. “However, the rhythm of the samples is in sync with the drips. This gives control over the density of the sound to the visitors of the exhibit.”
Bobrowski is also interested in the contrast between the way musicians and computers perform similar musical tasks. The performance version of Playing Rain pits performers against a computer as both attempt to synchronize with the drips.
The musicians play melodic gamelan instruments known as slentem, gender, and saron, in 5- and 7-note tunings called slendro and pelog, respectively. Bobrowski uses a Peavey DPM SP sampler as the computer’s sound source. Because the gamelan instruments’ bars are highly resonant, players must dampen a ringing note before striking a new one. The combined striking and damping action limits the speed at which performers can play wide intervallic leaps. At high speeds, the musicians tend to play in limited areas on their instruments and cannot hit octaves or achieve as wide a range of notes as easily as the computer can.
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Reprinted with permission from
Magazine, April, 2001© 2000, Intertec Publishing, A Primedia Company All Rights Reserved
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