Joyous noise

Edith Roy, a visitor from Montreal, takes a look at Peter Flemming's Stepper Motor Choir, which is powered by solar energy. (Bruce Bottomley Photo)

At once harmonious and cacophonous, the exhibit at the Dalhousie Art Gallery is a celebration of sound.

Resounding, a part of the Sound Bytes 2009: Halifax Art and Audio festival that took place over the past two months, features works by five different artists which toy with noise. The exhibit explores the generation of sound in unexpected ways.

The artists have manipulated and mutated the organic into a strange and wonderful chorus. Curators Peter Dykhuis and Sym Corrigan looked works that took something natural or normal and transformed those things into something unusual and original.

Using items that border on the mundane, such as toy xylophone keys and other toy instruments, artist Daniel Olson remixed their sounds into strange dreamscapes. Mr. Dykhuis described the pieces as “holding up a mirror to our assumptions about high and low technologies” – using plastic toy instruments which would normally not be considered appropriate for the creation of ‘real’ music to make avant-garde compositions.

Other pieces include a deconstructed and modified piano: Marla Hlady, in Playing Piano plays with the concept of the evolution of technology through a piano made analogous to a body, the brain from the 21st century technology, the heart and lungs stuck in the 19th century, and the 20th century body forced to try to compromise the two. Peter Flemming’s Stepper Motor Choir uses solar energy to make sound resonate through pieces of glass. The pieces of glass are spun by motors hooked up to a set of solar panels on the outside of the Dalhousie Arts Centre. The quality of the sound they make is altered based on the sun, or, in Halifax’s case, the lack thereof.

By far the most political piece in the exhibit is a video of a young man riding a motorcycle around Vieques, a Puerto Rican Island which was restricted to military personnel for many years. In Returning a Sound, created by Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, the young man uses the exhaust pipe on his motorcycle to play a trumpet. Filmed one week after the land was re-opened to the public, his journey is meant to symbolize a re-claiming of the land for the people.

As the noises from the various pieces overlap, something happens which is much greater than the impact of any one of the pieces alone. “Each moment is a unique performance,” says Mr. Dykhuis.

The way the sounds emanating from the various works of art combine is no accident – the curators were aware that this would occur and therefore set up the exhibit so the acoustics were just right. Peter Dykhuis said that he and his co-curator “were very sensitive towards the audio footprint each piece would have.”

Though the pieces were not built to go together, there can be no doubt that the experience of each is only enhanced by the overall impression of the combination of the pieces. Standing in just the right place in the gallery you can, for a moment, capture something beautiful, melodious and haunting.