Material Music

Material Music offers an alternative approach to sonic materialism, one that emphasises the corporeal materiality of the sound object. The work consists of an array of eight kinetic sound-sculptures, each of which is comprised of an electromechanically-struck block of solid matter. At the start of the piece, two actuators begin to strike the material blocks synchronously, at the rate 1 Hz. With every pulse, the left and right strikes in each unit are offset based on an ever-growing delay time unit that is derived from the speed of sound travelling through the different material types. With the passing of time, the delay offsets become audible and visible, producing rhythmic patterns that morph in and out of phase across all eight sound-sculptures. In this way, Material Music is a process-based composition that interlocks a steady pulse with ever-changing phasing audiovisual patterns that themselves derive from the very essence of the constituent audio/visual materials.