Sennheiser 2011 Annual Report Download - page 18

35
PSYCHOACOUSTICS

18 Hz
THE UNDERGROUND
THE SOUND FROM
Canadian artist Kristen Roos connects sofas to droning
machines and uses subway trains as deep-frequency drums.
For him, working with sound is a visual experience.
Two black sofas vibrating in the lobby of an art galle-
ry. Though subtle at first, the low-frequency thrum is
almost like listening to a lullaby. That is, until an
escalating quiver suddenly surprises the people sitting on
it. What is that sound? Is it emanating from some machine
close by? Is there something wrong with the building?
For Kristen Roos, such reactions are music to his
ears. The Canadian artist is obsessed with the resonance
of these deep sound waves. “I love catching people off
guard,” he admits, “and making them think.”
Take one of his earlier installations, for example:
subwoofers rock empty subway trains in a long-aban-
doned “ghost” station. “I’m fascinated by the deep dro-
nes,” laughs the 36-year-
old as we sit together on
his latest creation at the
Surrey Art Gallery just out-
side Vancouver. “They
make me feel good. It’s
very meditative.” His curator feels the same. Roos’ use of
infrasound has a decidedly otherworldly effect. The sofas
make it tactile, explains Ross Birdwise, but it isn’t the same
feel as, say, holding an electric toothbrush. “You feel the
sound. It’s ghostly. As if spirits had been released from
their graves and have possessed the couch.”
It all taps into Roos’ artistic calling: to make the
inaudible audible. For his show, Underground, Roos was
able to achieve his vision using tactile contact combined
with Sennheiser MKH 8020 microphones. Ross used the
ultra-sensitive microphones, which can record frequencies
beginning at 10 Hz, to record the machine and electrical
rooms hidden in the gallery’s basement. The sound – rife
among archaic-looking gauges and copper coils – was first
sculpted and sequenced before being hardwired to the
sofas via tactile transducers and speakers. Even though
the sofas muffle the noise somewhat, with the help of mi-
crophones, the underlying sound is transformed into
something more intense than they would have been in
situ. The result of the 15-minute-long loops? Think: musi-
cal compositions. “There’s no doubt that I’m turning it into
something more pleasing than it actually is,” he continues.
“I think of it as manipulating the drone into a sound that
pleases me.”
For Roos, it’s the idea of the underground writ
large. Reminiscent of the futur-
istic film Brazil, these industrial
behemoths may look bizarre,
but – in his mind – these ma-
chines are “real beauties”. In
his 2007 exhibition Ghost Sta-
tion, Roos recorded the moan-
ing and vibrating of subway
cars and sequenced them into
rhythms using subwoofers and
On the couch with a psycho-acous-
tician: Distorting perception and the
sense of uncertainty it evokes are just a
few of the instruments sound magician
Kristen Roos likes to play.
18
SPIRITUAL SOUND
6
haptic adapters, 8 laptop out-
puts and 2 times 3 subwoofers
in 6 empty subway cars. Kristen
Roos uses the equipment to
conjure up modern-day ghosts. Just as
he does in his project “Ghost Station,”
the sound artist uses deep bass sounds
to keep his audience trembling. “We live
in a surf of low-frequency waves,” says
the Canadian. “Many indigenous peoples
believe them to be sounds from the
spirit world.”