'Frequencies' is a collection of recent audio visual works by Dublin based Anthony Kelly and David Stalling. Their work encompass a shared practice of recycling 'objets trouveés' of sound, visual and text material as part of their ongoing collaborative projects. The results are collages of everyday noise and original music snippets taken from accumulated field recordings and old personal cassette tapes. This juxtaposition of contrasting material results in a series of audio/visual 'musique concrète' pieces.
This is a short text I wrote for the booklet accompanying the show at the Basement Gallery, Dundalk, Ireland in March of this year.
Like crystal, like metal and many other substances, I am a sonorous being, but I hear my own vibration from within; as Malraux said, I hear myself with my throat.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible
You are in a room.
It is filled with sound. Just one uniform tone it seems, unchanging, but when you move, a discordancy in the otherwise smooth ‘hhmmmm...’ is noticed. You stop. The smoothness, the unending unchanging progress of the tone re-establishes itself.
You move again. Walk around, perhaps turn your head this way, then that or bend over to pick up a piece of paper. And the tone goes on, but all the time you notice how it swoons with your every movement, registering each little fluctuation, spiking with a sharp upturn to the left, wavering with any lean downward.
Sound surrounds you, noise surrounds you, even music possibly, though possibly not. (How does one decide?)
Listen. There are two frequencies. These are not identical but while the listener is still they create one solid, unchanging tone. Move however and the sound alters, shifting and depending on the position of the body. Each is a wavelength of specific frequency, a sound wave of regular, rhythmic upturn and downturn through space. These peaks and troughs surround you, collide with you, resonate throughout you.
The variability of the sound is a result of the fact that the peaks and troughs of one frequency combine with those of the other frequency in differing configurations at each point of the room, at any one point in time. Your movement through this field of sound waves opens you up with each slight shift to an altered configuration of the two frequencies.
At any one point in time. Spatial and temporal. Now. Now. In a room.
In this manner the listener plays an active role in the constitution of what he or she hears. Of what you hear. Sound is not an objective element, despite all the scientific determinations we may give it. The distinction between you and the world, subject and object no longer holds. Like an electric bass guitar not plugged in, whose only sound is that of plunking strings, but yet emits the deepest richest tones when played resting against an empty wardrobe, sound is a perfect unity between you and the world, those apparently separate poles.
((Have you ever listened to yourself? Your voice in your throat. The joints clicking. The low level hum at 4.33am - a silence that is no silence))
The act of listening then is no simple observation of what is given to your ears. What you hear is your very existence - life, negotiations, a movement through a world. Not only do you hear sound but you feel it, in the pit of your stomach, the back of your neck - your throat. Frequencies are only through you.
And who or what, might we ask, are you? ...‘at any one point in time’... You are that point. The needle on the grammophone. A sonorous being, you are Dasein, Being-there, being-in-the-world.
Frequencies, sound waves, ways of speaking. Ways of expressing the point, the fact that you are here.
You are in a room.
Notes: This text draws on Matrix [for rooms] by Ryoji Ikeda, Touch Music, TO:44, 2001 for its inspiration.
