The mobile greenhouse is a room for tactile sound and listening experiences and home to the instrument bAUM. Through participatory performance practices SymbioLab artists are exploring ecological-social relations and vital materialities. We wonder, how might tactile sound and multi-sensory listening assist in cultivating an expanded perception of ecological community?
These are notes from my experiences with bAUM, a tactile sound instrument and participatory performance practice developed by Patrick Dallard and I, as SymbioLab. bAUM is a constellation of drum, string bench and frame are temporarily completed by two or more participants in direct contact with the instrument. As participants play the strings, sing into the drum and lay on the bench the whole animal-vegetal-mineral-sonority cluster engages in the transmission and reception of vibrations, primarily bone conducted rather than air conducted sound. Situated in the Lyssnarlab, this constellation extends to include the surrounding environment.
The conduction of vibration in bAUM is as much energy as matter; tension and resistance of piano strings and steel frame, of drum skin and hollow tree; resistance and release of and in between participants. All matters of being involved in this instrument conduct and change the passage of vibration. We are engaging with as an amplified experience of vibration being, in frequencies tangible to human touch.
Tactile sound might invite a sensorial experience of the theoretical, of matter as essentially vibrational, of body as a vibrational being, porously affecting the flows of energy around.
Julia Adzuki 2019
it begins when we place our hands on the bench, wood grain lines connecting us
a light touch on tensioned strings sends tangible vibrations undulating, through the wood, through our hands, arms, bones, waking sleeping senses to a materiality that is live, vibrant even, borders remember porosity and the affect of the invisible entrains
There is a sense of being inside an egg, safely contained yet vulnerable, receptive to all outer vibrations, a tremor of passing traffic, a conversation circumnavigating the shell, the sensory stimulation of the instrument tickles, irritates, relaxes parts of the self, dream images flicker and a meditative state ensues, the hum of it lingering for quite some time after, outside the laboratory I notice my senses more alert to the flow of vibration through and around me, a breeze, sunlight, subtle exchanges in conversation, complex shapes in sound
© SymbioLab 2019