absolute value of noise

Music for magnolias
An outdoor solar powered sound work.
by Absolute Value of Noise © 2024

Eight solar powered Spots hang in a magnolia tree. As the sun moves across the sky, it shines through the leaf coverage and produces a dappled light effect on the solar cells. This causes the solar power for Spot to fade in and out. Little 8-bit custom made synthesizers react to the light and play with different sounds and signal strengths at different times of the day and in different weather conditions.

An audio recording of the piece will appear here soonish December 2024/January 2025.

Spots in a rhododendron, November 2024.

I read a lot of science fiction, and often incorporate wild, future-thinking ideas about the world into my artworks. Music for magnolias is influenced by the work of cyber-punk/bio-punk authour, Linda Nagata. In one series of stories, she proposes a world where naturally evolved lifeforms, bio-engineered lifeforms, and electro-mechanical living systems start to merge and hybridize. Together, they create a whole new ecosystem that is both brave and dangerous (in its scope and ability to produce the unforeseen). Within this realm, I imagine the Spots as creatures sitting on the electro-mechanical side of the life-form equation. They see themselves as living hybrids and full participants in a new eco-system and a new web of life.

Each Spot is built like a sandwich, starting with a Solar Cell (60mm across), on top of a circuit board. The Spots are designed to provide habitat for small insects. Different insects look for gaps of certain sizes that exist in the natural world. The gap between the solar cells and the circuit boards encourage specific insects to bring their own nesting materials and move in. Once the piece has been outside for a few months it will play home to spiders, treehoppers, small beetles, tiny bees, and other critters.

There are 8 to 9 Spots on a tree. Most of them are sound-makers. One of them is a sound-mixer, one a micro-speaker amplifier, and one (if it is there) is a radio transmitter. Micro-speaker tubes hang down providing a quiet and directional sound system. Listeners can hide underneath the branches of the tree, searching out the noises that are made in response to the sun.

Music for magnolias uses custom made 8-bit synthesizer chips. Each one is programmed by the artist to make a set of simple sounds. The programmatic nature of the sounds is reminiscent of works by Brian Eno (who also uses custom programmed sounds in many of his works). This style of creating synthetic sounds from raw waveforms via coding instead of via keyboard + sequencer + patchcords, has a certain feel or style to it that is distinctive and peculiar. Sometimes it feels very musical; sometimes it is reminiscent of an eccentric car alarm.

Spots in a rhododendron, November 2024.

absolutevalueofnoise.ca | audio available on bandcamp