Chambers: Scores by Alvin Lucier

11. Outlines and Bird and Person Dyning

OUTLINES and BIRD AND PERSON DYNINC This page intentionally left blank OUTLINES (1975) of persons and things, for microphones, loudspeakers, and electronic sounds. Position any number of loudspeakersbehind persons and things. Through the loudspeakersmix clusters of sine tones of short enough wavelengths in relationship to the sizes of the persons and things so as to create audible diffraction patterns around and in front of them. Persons may move in front of and out away from stacks ofloudspeakers, creating moving sound shadows. Microphone handlers may scan the things with directional microphones routed through amplifiers to loudspeakers. These two activities may be performed separately or together, in which case the diffracted images may be heard acoustically mixed. 147 BIRD AND PERSON DYNING (1975) for performer with microphones, amplifiers , loudspeakersand electronic sound-producing object. Route a binaural microphone system with long cables through amplifiers with limiters to one or more pairs of loudspeakers. Place an electronic bird or similar sound-producing object anywhere in the performance space. Plug it in. Setthe amplifiers' volume levels so that the sounds of the twittering bird, picked up by the microphones, can be heard through the loudspeakers, and feedback, controlled by the limiters, occurs. Stand anywhere facing the bird. Listen to it, wearing the binaural microphone system, a miniature microphone in each ear. Walk in very slow motion, passing the bird and/or loudspeakers, mapping the acoustic characteristics of the space in terms of the pitches, intensities, and shapes of the encountered strands of feedback. Turn, dip, and tilt your head to make corrections and fine adjustments and to move the sounds of the twittering bird from loudspeaker to loudspeaker. Stop from time to time to catch and hold single and multiple strands of feedback so that interactions , if any, between them and the twitters can more clearly be heard. Search for phantom twitters, including mirror images above and below the originals, caused by heterodyning. Use the directional properties of the binaural system to localize these phenomena for listeners. 148 I'd like to ask some questions about your three most recent pieces, namely Still and Moving Lines, Outlines, and the piece you described to me that's as yet untitled. While I was thinking about them and forming some questions, it occurred to me that there are some interesting similarities between them. One might be that in both Still and Moving Lines and Outlines you use essentially neutral sound sources, ones that are very simple and not at all the subject matter of the pieces, but these sound sources, being neutral, allow what is of interest to become apparent to the audience, in one way or another. And it seems to me—you perhaps will disagree —that the sound source in the bird piece, while not as simple as the others, is similar in being arbitrary; it's an object that works according to its own rules. So, I'd like to ask if you're aware of continuing interests that would account for the similar propositions with different approaches that we find in these three pieces? I am, yes. While you were asking this question it struck me that the first two, Still and Moving Lines and Outlines, I composed by design. I had ideas about certain sonic phenomena and I had to work to find a way to realize them in each of the pieces. In the first piece, Still and Moving Lines, it was standing wave phenomena and being able to spin the standing waves around, and in Outlines, it was being able to display the diffraction outlines of an object caused by sound. The third piece, the bird piece asyou say, I discovered by accident. It was given to me in various ways. The piece involves an electronic bird, the kind you can buy in stores for use as a Christmas tree ornament . It consists of a plastic ball with a loudspeaker and a simple electronic circuit inside, and it makes a kind of bird-like sound. You simply plug it in. It was sent to me by Doug Kahn, a young California 149 artist whom I have never met. I guess he sent it to me because of some interest he must have had in my work; it came in the mail one day out of the blue. He said it was part of "A Dream Aviary...