Lost & Found Orchestra III (2017)

  • Foundscape, Installations, Sound Installations
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For the third edition of the project I returned to Radio Kootwijk, to the premises of the historic building they called ‘The Cathedral’ where I designed my first Lost & Found Orchestra a year earlier. This time I was allowed to build a composition for a 20 meter deep pit in the ground, which was once was dug by hand, to be able to reach and pump up the ground water to the surface, for use as drinking water for the area.

The pit had concrete walls, and in the middle of the pit a revolving staircase, made of different thickness of metal. I mounted my actuators to the metal structures and pipes, and wrote a composition for it. The actuators all were connected to LED lights, so in semi darkness it would be possible for the audience to ‘see’ the sounds in the space while looking down into the pit from a safe distance.

An extra instrument I designed for this project was a small valve that released a drop of water on command, which received signals from the same composition, so it could rhythmically drop its’ drops of water into the pit, where the drops would make a free fall of twenty meters down, into a aquarium on the middle of the bottom of the pit, where an underwater (hydrophonic) microphone would catch the sound of the drop falling into the aquarium, which in turn would turn this sound into a atmospheric soundscape of rhythmic waterdrops.

The usage of reverb in this composition became quite important because of the long distances between the different sound sources and large amount of echo that was caused by the space itself. The echo became a big part of the atmosphere and the view from above into the put gave the installation a hypnotic quality.