Silver Sounds
24.10.2008
Silver Sounds Exhibition with MTBF soundscape wins award
See the exhibition’s site at http://www.naughtongallery.org/silversounds.
The exhibition is unique because visitors can ‘hear’ as well as see the University’s silver collection, through using handheld computers to highlight objects and listen to the artists’ interpretations. Ten internationally renowned sound artists created sound pieces to accompany 22 of the silver objects, exploring their origins and the reasons for their creation and use. Read the rest of this entry »
Trowel and Seal Silver Sounds exhibition soundscape, Naughton Gallery, QUB, Belfast
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This composition was commissioned by Queens University, Belfast, for the QUB Silver Collection soundscapes project, a permanent exhibition at QUB’s Naughton Gallery that presents the universities rich silver collection in a setting where each piece is accompanied by a soundscape, commissioned from one of ten internationally renowned sound artists. These soundscapes respond to the provenance of a particular piece of silverware and explore the reasons for its creation, donation and use and combine with the silver objects to create a new immersive artwork.
The exhibition won the 2008 Times Higher Education Award for Excellence and Innovation in the Arts.
The soundscape for the two exhibition objects Presentation Seal and Trowel (1896) is based on the re-contextualisation of sounds stemming from the life cycle and environment of the exposed objects: their creation, their materiality, their usage, and the concepts and entities they refer to. These sounds are re-contextualised into a soundscape according to their sonic characteristics by corpus-based synthesis, creating a reminiscence of the objects’ presence in its multiple facets, a sort of sonic cubism.