26 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - cryptic lamellaphone

This episode focuses on an acoustic sculptural object I devised and built in 2014. It’s a cryptic flattened cylinder that rests on a low stool. A pair of identical stools face each other across the object. Gallery visitors are invited to sit, in pairs, to hold and move the object in their hands. Sounds are generated within the object - rolling, bumping and random sequences of resonant metallic tones. The object is an instrument producing a musicality of uncertainty. The mechanism is hidden within, prompting investigation by peering into slots around its perimeter. Like looking into a microscope there’s a scale transition from the space of the room to the shadowy micro-architectural world within, and a simple revelation of the sonic mechanism. Three table tennis balls roll freely around striking any of the dozens of individual steel tines mounted on hardwood blocks inside. The object’s form is intentionally reminiscent of the zoetrope, a 19th century pre-cinema optical device for creating animated visual effects. But rather than animation of vision, this object animates sound, relationships, association and memory. I built the cryptic lamellaphone as an homage to the 19th century English ‘natural philosopher’ Robert Brown (1773-1858). In 1827, he observed a captivating phenomenon through his microscope which he carefully described but could not adequately explain. It was the apparently animated - that is, life driven - motion of pollen grains in water. He published a paper - A Breif Account of Microscopical Observations made in the months of June, July and August 1827 on the particles contained in the pollen of plants and on the general existence of active molecules in organic and inorganic bodies.” Decades later in the early twentieth century, Australian physicist William Sutherland, Polish scientist Marian Smoluchowski and Albert Einstein independently theorised what Brown had seen - the random motion of minute particles in suspension - as evidence of molecular activity, informed by the rapidly developing new ideas in physics about ‘the atom’. On the movement of small particles suspended in a stationary liquid demanded by the molecular-kinetic theory of heat. The phenomenon is now known as Brownian motion. So this episode comprises direct and manipulated recordings - made with different microphone types - of my ‘cryptic lamellaphone’ singing songs for Robert Brown.