Art and Music

The ice mirror cometh

Posted on by Andrew Grantham

It’s a bit cold outside — but not cold enough to make a sound mirror out of ice, which is what has been done in Alaska!
Freeze project sound mirror by mayer sattler-smith and Marisa Favretto
The mirror was created as part of the Freeze celebration of Alaska and life in the North held in Anchorage during January 2009. It was designed by Klaus Mayer, Petra Sattler-Smith and Marisa Favretto, who were inspired to create the ice mirror by the British sound mirrors.

Sound Mirror is inspired by Northern states of change and flux in weather, environment, light and atmosphere. We are interested in emphasizing these juxtapositions, highlighting the states in nature that are significant to states of perception. We are interested in the work acting as a mirror to the elements – light, landscape, passing birds, planes, sounds, while creating a space/form specific to viewer interaction – via size, orientation, composition.

The form is inspired by sound mirrors – a form built around coastal towns in England between 1915 and 1930 to function as an acoustic radar for approaching war planes. The first one was carved out of the chalk cliff on the coast in 1915.
Source: Freeze project

Photographs of the mirror being built from blocks of ice.

The PDF explaining the initial design concept includes a photograph of the Abbot’s Cliff sound mirror near Folkestone.

The completed mirror was praised by Michelle Mitchell in The Freeze Art Show at a Healthy Ten Below at Scribbit:

The most beautiful of the exhibits was a sound mirror that must have been fifteen or sixteen feet high and was built from this gorgeous frosty blue ice that almost looked like it was resin rather than ice. The blocks fit perfectly together to form this giant slab with a concave center so that if you stood on the platform opposite and spoke toward the dish it would reflect your voice back at you.
Source: Scribbit 2009-01-12

There is also a picture of the finished installation on Flickr. Anyone got any more good pictures of it?

Sites of Special Sonic Interest

Posted on by Andrew Grantham

Scott Hawkins has been documenting, cataloging and performing at Sites of Special Sonic Interest across the UK. I classify a performance as any kind of physical interaction resulting in an audible product. Here, looking into the eye of the Sound Mirror at Kilnsea on Spurn Head, the wind (persistent ghostly presence) combined to produce and aerophonic ambient extravaganza.

Disinformation and Sound Mirrors

Posted on by Andrew Grantham

Roadside Picnics – Disinformation and Sound Mirrors

by Joe Banks & Caroline Grigson

The following text was written in 1997, but did not appear in print until it featured under the title “Antiphony Architectural Supplement” on pages 57-64 of issue 6 of Sound Projector – an experimental noise magazine published in 1999 (Sound Projector is still going strong, but issue 6 is no longer available). The “Antiphony Architectural Supplement” was published to document and explore ideas suggested by the imagery of the Disinformation “Antiphony” double CD and “Antiphony Video Supplement” (later retitled “Blackout”) – both created in 1997, which featured images by photographer Julian Hills and film-maker Barry Hale of air defence Sound Mirrors found at various sites on the UK coast.

….

The solution was provided by an article by W. Harms in Shortwave Magazine, which described a series of massive concrete monoliths which still stand, slowly crumbling into waste-land at a site near Dungeness in Kent. These structures, built in the 1920s and 1930s, formed a primitive experimental early-warning system – several elegant, but extremely austere concave shapes designed to allow the precise triangulation of directional-fixes on the distant sounds of incoming enemy Zeppelins, aircraft and ships.

These shapes rise up out of the Kentish shingle like the strange ceremonial relics of a dead civilisation or unknown tribal culture (and if you consider military R&D as an anthropological entity as well as a purely technical enterprise, then perhaps this interpretation is not as wild as it seems). Appearing alongside a picture of the abandoned Church of St. Giles in the village of Imber (the ghost-town on the tank-ranges of Salisbury Plain) and digital artwork representing the anthropomorphic slang of the RAF, the sound mirrors provided photographer Julian Hills with his Disinformation ‘remix’ for “Antiphony”.

Extensive literature and archive research has so far uncovered a total of seventeen mirrors, sixteen on the Kent and Yorkshire coasts, and one at a site in Malta (which, according to Casemate magazine, is “approached through a slurry of cow muck and dead chickens”). Ten of these can still be visited today, one is buried, two have collapsed, while there are four more mirrors whose status remains, from my point of view, unknown. Architecturally many of the sound mirrors look as though they could have been designed yesterday, and it is on close inspection that they their true state of distress is revealed. It is hard not be impressed by this geometry – the striking contrasts between elegant, concave parabolas and their rough textures, their impressive solidity and substantial physical forms.

More at /seconds

History of the Future of War Noises

Posted on by Andrew Grantham

The Sound Mirrors: A History of the Future of War Noises is a July 2008 article by Ithamar Silver from Le Panoptique.

Although “not part of architectural history proper,” a series of moss and graffiti covered ruins along England’s southeastern coast belies one of the more grandly misguided displays of national insecurity to be produced by the tumult of the twentieth century. The remains are as imposing and impenetrable as any fortress—yet these were not traditional fortifications meant to withstand an enemy onslaught, a fact that renders their solidity largely palliative.

They were, essentially, ears.

(where it says one in Boulby that had somehow been transformed into a private residence, it should presumably read “Selsey”)

Abbot's Cliff sound mirror
Meanwhile, Peter Frost has sent this photo of the Abbot’s Cliff sound mirror, which he came across whilst walking towards Dover from Capel-le-Ferne in Kent.

Stone ears teach people to shout through the English Channel

Posted on by Andrew Grantham

A Russian-language page on the Autogena proposal for modern cross-Channel sound mirrors, with some rather familiar looking photos. “????????? ???” seems to be listening ear, and “???????? ???????” is sound wall. Google translates the title of the article as “Stone ears teach people to shout through the English Channel”.

The vodka is good, but the meat is rotten?

Sound mirror on Bass Communion album

Posted on by Andrew Grantham

A correspondent e-mails to say that he first discovered the sound mirrors when he saw pictures on the CD booklet/cover art of a Bass Communion album. They are great images, done by Carl Glover of Aleph Studios, showing a view up the 200 foot mirror at Denge.
Bass Communion album cover
Bass Communion is a project by Steven Wilson, leader of the band Porcupine Tree. According to the Bass Communion website, it specialises in recordings in an ambient and/or electronic vein, sometimes in collaboration with other artists. Most of the pieces are experiments in texture made from processing recordings of real instruments and field recordings.

The March 2003 album Bass Communion (remixed) contains Reconstructions and recycling of Bass Communion music by artists from the experimental, electronic and ambient music scenes.

Wat Tyler’s sonic marshmallows

Posted on by Andrew Grantham

A pair of sound reflectors were installed at the Wat Tyler country park in Essex during February 2007, as of a regeneration program launched by Basildon Council.

The permanent installation is one of a series of sculptures commissioned for the park. The brief was to create something playful and challenging for the children there. The sculptures allow their users to whisper to each other while 60m apart.

Sonic marshmallows at Wat Tyler country park in Essex. Photo: Troika

The Sonic Marshmallow create a stunning acoustic experience: their shape focuses sound and allows people standing in front to hear each other’s whispers 60 metres over the pond that separate them. They work like reflectors to create a precise beam of sound.

The cylinders are also concave on their other sides, allowing the users to respectively spy on the people in the nearby car park, and the animal in the woodland, thanks to those 2.5m ears.

Designers Troika say Basildon being so close to the coast, we were also inspired by the early sound mirrors built between the two wars as early attempts of detecting incoming enemy planes approaching. Famous remaining examples lye off the Kent coast, near Dungeness.

Acoustic engineering consultancy was provided by Sandy Brown Associates, and fabrication by London Engineering.