Spectra - Sound design & composition for an interactive art exhibit
What: A Interactive Art Installation Created in partnership with Manasc Isaac Architects
Involvement: Sound Designer, Composer
Areas Of Responsibility: Developing a 20 minute soundtrack for the Spectra experience at Vignettes Art & Design Festival
Notable Facts: Spectra was a sensory art installation created a created by a multi-disciplinarian team of architects, designers, and myself. Featured as part of the Vignettes Art & Design Festival, I was tasked with composing a 20 min soundscape to match ever shifting light patterns of the Spectra structure. The installation ran from September 2018 to December 2018 and was featured in Avenue Magazine.
Spectra’s feature in the May 2019 edition of Avenue Magazine
I created 4 separate pieces for Spectra, here is the story behind each of them:
1) Prism
This piece was inspired by pure white light passing through a broken glass, slowly getting more and more distorted as the light’s intensity grows. It’s intended to unnerve and make people uneasy. It’s also meant to envelope people as they walk into Spectra. It was created by distorting a pure sine wave into greater and greater levels of chaos, accompanied by disorienting metallic strikes from my GUDA drum. The low rumbles come from slowed down recordings from Edmonton’s LRT system as they pass through the station.
2) Back To Nature
This piece is a bit of a counterpoint to the first one, designed to create a feeling of relaxation and relaxation after the intensity of the first place. Its metallic melodies have a somewhat liquid quality that are expanded on in the next piece. It features a bed of sound created by mixing recordings taken from a walk through an Edmonton neighbourhood and a nature preserve.
3) Water
This piece was designed to explore how water can distort light in its own unique way. It starts off with recorded sounds from the North Saskatchewan river, both above and below water. The melody was written to mimic the meandering nature of the river and how sound changes as it moves in and out of water.
4) When Glass Talks
This one was inspired by the sound of space and the idea that Spectra itself could possibly speak. I imagined that if it were a creature from another world, we may not be able to understand its words, but perhaps we could still gather meaning from its sound.
