‘Immovable Objects Secret States’ by John Billan

Next John is off to England to to photograph the Sound Mirrors around the Kent area (including the truly astounding Denge sound mirrors – click on the photos below to see a larger version) and to do some recording of the sounds they reflect. I am jealous LOL – they are such amazing structures, what a good find. I can only imagine the sounds and photos that John will get.
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Andrew Joron and The Sound Mirror

Christopher Nelson’s Poetry Blog has an interview with Andrew Joron, “the metaphysician-elect of contemporary American poetry”, about his book The Sound Mirror.

Nelson: Your title, The Sound Mirror—can you elaborate on that synesthetic paradox? Or would that be to explain away the pleasant mystery?

Joron: In one sense, the idea of a “sound mirror” is not a paradox. Part of the science of acoustics is concerned with the way sound is reflected from surfaces such as the walls of a concert hall. And before the invention of radar, England constructed huge hemispherical “sound mirrors” out of concrete and placed them in open fields as listening devices that would amplify the sound of approaching bombers from Germany. In my case, I appropriated the title from an old Sun Ra LP, which has never been reissued on CD. Sun Ra himself got the title from the first commercially available recording device, released in the forties, which was called The Sound Mirror. But you’re right to note my intent to complicate the sound/light relation in presenting this title. Writing that uses the phonetic alphabet becomes a “sound mirror”; I want to emphasize that, while sound may be exiled from the written word, it continues to haunt the scene—the seen—of writing.
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Sonic Marshmallow interview

Graphics.com has an interview with Troika Design Studios which discusses the “Sonic Marshmallows” sound mirror-inspired installation at Wat Tyler country park in Essex.

We see Sonic Marshmallows more as a manifestation of people’s desire to interact with each other, rather than with things. Sonic Marshmallows can be used only in conjunction with another user. Sound mirrors were originally used on the coast of Kent to detect incoming enemy planes, not far from the location were Sonic Marshmallows is installed now. We used the same technology in a way that enables people to communicate with each other instead.
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Music from the weather through sound mirrors

Inspired by sound mirrors, someone suggests musicalizing a weather system through landscape architecture.

BLDGBLOG here proposes a series of sound mirrors to be built in a landscape with regular, annual wind phenomena. A distant gully, moaning at 2am every second week in October, every year, due to northern winds from Canada, has its low, droning, cliff-created reverb carefully echoed back up a chain of sound mirrors to supply natural soundscapes for the sleeping residents of nearby towns.

Or a crevasse that actually makes no sound at all has a sound mirror built nearby, which then amplifies and redirects the ambient air movements, coaxing out a tone – but only for the first week of March. Annually.

Sound mirror orchestra in Belgium

According to Andreas Angelidakis‘s website, Artes Musicales is an exhibition on the relationship of contemporary art and classical music. It is curated by Christophe de Jaeger and Joost Fonteyne, and opened at Alden Biesen castle in Belgium in July and runs to August 30.

Based on Sound Mirrors, the WWII ancient bunker-like radars, we proposed a set of musical buildings for the park surrounding the castle.

These structures, arranged in the park like instruments in an orchestra, would catch the sounds of the trees an maybe people having fun around them, and who knows what it would sound like.

I can’t quite tell from the website whether they have actually been built or not – the pictures just show models, so I guess not.

Abbot’s Cliff hum and gusts

A 75 second recording of the wind at the Abbot’s Cliff sound mirror on 2 April 2009 by Steven Rowell. Evident in this recording, with mic placed directly on concrete mirror concave face, is a noticeable, resonant hum below 150Hz. Wind gusts on the cliffs were quite strong.

It is from radio aporee ::: maps

an open project about the creation and exploration of public soundscapes. it collects and organizes recordings of daily surroundings and other sonic habitats from all over the world. the sounds are organized within a mashup system of mapping software, databases, telephone networks and the Internet. sites and sounds can also be explored and accessed in situ by recent GPS-enabled mobile devices.

The Devil of Denge Marsh

I think it must have been a radio programme, or something like that… the picture seems to show an aloe vera plant attacking the 30 foot mirror at Denge.

The Scarifyers return in their second full-length adventure…

A melting minister… a scientific project gripped by madness…
a remote village on the Kent coast where the locals have some strange habits indeed. It’s all just the ticket for top-secret government department, MI-13.

Lionheart (Nicholas Courtney) and Dunning (Terry Molloy) are back, to do battle with the Women’s Institute, an old adversary and an inter-dimensional being from the dawn of time – THE DEVIL OF DENGE MARSH.
Source: Cosmic Hobo

Denge sound mirrors feature in prize-winning graphic story

Julian Hanshaw won the 2008 Observer/Cape Graphic Short Story Prize with Sand Dunes and Sonic Booms, described by the Observer as a “haunting, evocative and beautifully drawn story”. It is set on the south coast, and at the Denge mirrors in particular.

We loved Hanshaw’s sense of time and place – an effect he achieved partly through a series of sepia frames illustrating the south coast. Hanshaw is an animator by training, and moved to Winchelsea, East Sussex from London three years ago. Since then he has become ‘mildly obsessed’ with the area, particularly the spectral and strange Dungeness. The idea for ‘Sand Dunes and Sonic Booms’ came after a visit to one of the south coast’s sound mirrors – primitive devices designed to detect and track military aircraft before the First World War (though the ones in Kent date from the 1930s).
Source: The Observer 2009-11-09

You can read the story here: Sand Dunes & Sonic Booms.

Invaders Must Die by The Prodigy

On February 23 2009 The Prodigy will release an album called Invaders Must Die, which features a track of the same name for which a video was shot at Dungeness. The Denge sound mirrors feature from about 1 min 15 sec in.

‘Invaders Must Die’ is 40 minutes of having your head battered by future nostalgia, serotonin levels twisted by feel-good horrorcore and your synapses snapped by whiplash attitude. It’s the sound of The Prodigy mixing up genres, contorting the past and rewiring the future, ram-raiding through the tranquility of music’s status quo like a blot on the landscape of England’s dreaming.
Source: Invaders Must Die

So now we know. I just hope no morons get it into their heads to try vandalising the mirrors as depicted in the video.

The mirrors have been used by a variety of musicians, including Turin Brakes, Bass Communion and Blank & Jones.

(thanks to Ken Morrow for letting me know about the video)