LISTEN WITH HEADPHONES

Excerpt from: Art Is Not A Commodity by Russell Frehling
the current exhibit at the Listening Gallery

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Art Is Not A Commodity
(A Sound Installation, Miami Beach, 2011)

For this installation specific sounds from the surrounding ambient noise are recorded then digitally encoded. From these samples extremely short segments, a few thousandths of a second long, are extracted and looped in such a way as to render them essentially static instantaneous slices; the way that a photograph has the ability to freeze a subject in motion. These waveforms are distributed along a line of twenty loudspeakers that form a soundfield along two faces of the Artcenter 800-810 buildings

I’ve further distilled from these waveforms only the uppermost spectral components. What is left are these delicate ethereal timbres which have been inconspicuously layered on top of and interact with the real-time ambient noise in curious and unpredictable ways

Russell Frehling , Nov. 2011