music for sleeping

music for sleeping
analog and digital sound synthesis circuits on painted birch/maple panels
each 8W x 10H x 1.25 inches
2020

Intimacies and Influences, Open House Contemporary, Chicago, January 10, 2020

The site of the gallery at Open House Contemporary is domestic and work is lived with, by short term residents, the primary audience. My work often plays with utility and function as a possibility, and is very often designed/developed in direct response to site and context. In this case my work is a sound installation located in a bedroom. A series of white noise generators are filtered and their volume is modulated, slowly, creating layers of subtle shifts and swells. The sound is meant to exist between presence and dissolve, to encourage a drift between an active and passive listening, between being awake and asleep…

I’m interested in allowing opportunities for what might be hidden or non-visual to become visual - this has been a decades long strand in my work. Usually circuits are enclosed in boxes and hidden from sight, but here the circuits are carefully assembled on the face of panels. The layout of the circuits (analog noise generator and voltage controlled filter) was developed on a breadboard and the circuits were transferred directly from this arrangement, and were carefully and tediously hand wired on and through the panels, allowing for the prototyping architecture of the breadboard to influence the visual arrangement of component and pathway. Amplification and several digital states of the sound synthesis process do happen behind the scenes (LFO, VCA, sequencer). These digital circuits are less visually interesting than their analog counterparts, and are enclosed behind the panels, doing their work, as circuits usually do, invisibly…