feedback bowls / chromatic bowls

This installation turns inert objects into resonant vessels which sing to themselves. Each steel bowl has a contact microphone and transducer attached, creating a feedback loop across its surface as the microphone picks up the transducer’s output. Software listens and adjusts the signal flow, allowing a variety of sonic results to emerge based on the bowls’ resonant frequencies. The vibrations from visitors’ movement may also add slight disruption to this signal chain, magnified by the exponential nature of feedback.

chromatic bowls is a 2016 variant that incorporates colored lights. The orb above each bowl responds to its sound, its light colored according to Isaac Newton’s color wheel in Opticks (1704). Newton divided the color wheel into seven segments, each of the pure colors of the rainbow representing a white key on the piano. Just as the singing bowls’ pitches represent a spectrum of microtonal shadings between these notes, so do the colors of the constellation pulsing above it.

History:

The Windup Space, David Smooke album release show, Baltimore, MD, 1 Nov. 2016
Kiosk Gallery, Kansas City, MO, 16 September - 13 October 2016 (Black House Sound Art Residency)
KANEKO, Omaha, NE, 6-9 July 2016 (Omaha Under the Radar Festival)
Georgia Southern University, Statesboro, GA, 11-13 February (SEAMUS 2016)
Eastern Bloc Gallery, 19 June 2015 (Montreal Contemporary Music Lab)