Thursday, May 6, 2010

Musical sculptures?!


Around the world, people have gotten pretty clever with manipulating natural phenomenons (phenomena?) in order to produce music. The Sea Organ, for example, is an architectural object in Croatia which is a series of tubes and a resonating cavity underneath marble steps at the shore of the ocean, whose waves and wind create random notes. The sculpture was designed by a man named Nikola Bašić, is 230 feet long and has 35 pipes built under the concrete. The harmonies change as you walk along the promenade but are never dissonant despite the randomness of the sea and wind, since the pipes were all tuned to be able to sound good together. A similar object in San Francisco is the Wave Organ, another acoustic sculpture that rather than being particularly musical, tends to amplify the sounds of the sea's rumbles, gurgles, and sloshes through a series of pipes that interact with the tide and project the sounds to listeners at different stations. Lastly, the High Tide Organ is a structure attached to the sea wall in Blackpool, England that uses the force of the tides to produce the harmonic series in B flat. At high tide, the swell of the sea pushes air up through 18 organ pipes built within the sculpture, causing it to sound.
On another note, the Singing Ringing Tree is a sound sculpture in the northwest of England that generates discordant, haunting sounds as the western winds of the moor blow through it. It stands at about 10 feet tall, is composed of galvanized steel pipes, and covers a range of several octaves.
Also in the group of musical sculptures are singing roads, or musical roads, the first of which was created in 1995 in Denmark by Steen Krarup Jensen and Jakob Freud-Magnus, who called their creation the Asphaltophone. It's made of a series of raised pavement markers. The Melody Road and Singing Road in Japan and Korea respectively, are musical roads constructed of a series of grooves carved into the pavement at intervals. The tunes are based on the depth and spacing of the grooves, as at close intervals they produce higher sounds, and at widely spaced intervals, they produce deeper ones. In Japan there are three Melody Roads, and in Korea there is only the one. The one in Korea was designed specifically to help motorists stay alert and awake, whereas the Japanese ones were constructed for tourism. Also, the Civic Musical Road is a quarter-mile stretch of road in Lancaster, California, whose grooves cause the finale of the William Tell Overture to resound as you drive over it.

No comments:

Post a Comment