Pointing Sounds

Feedback work-out for performer and wireless microphone (2008/2023)

 ‘Pointing Sounds’ is a feedback study inspired by ‘I am sitting in a room’ (1968), Alvin Lucier’s famous feedback composition. In Lucier’s concept, a spoken text is recorded and then played back through a loudspeaker. That playback is then recorded again by a microphone located in the same room. The process of playback and recording is repeated again and again, creating a feedback cycle in which spatial resonances characteristic of the room in which the recording takes place – so-called ‘eigenfrequencies’ – are constantly amplified and accumulate, making the original speaking voice less and less intelligible. The effect is an intriguing metamorphosis from a spoken text to a shimmering soundscape of feedback tones that in the end only vaguely recall their human origins in their rhythmicity.

A similar technique is employed in ‘Pointing Sounds’, although the starting point here is not words but the percussive finger snaps of a performer, and different positionings of a microphone in a closed space. As is the case in I am sitting in a room, the outcome of the feedback process will depend on the dimensions and acoustic properties of the space in which the performance takes place. However, a new dimension is added to Lucier’s concept: starting from the observation that not only resonance characteristics but also the location and orientation of the microphone in the room can influence the frequencies and behaviour of the feedback tones, the performer moves the microphone in a twenty-four-second movement cycle to six different positions that are articulated with a snap of the finger in a first cycle and then ‘pointed’ with the microphone at exactly the same position and moment in the subsequent cycles each time. As a result, the repeated articulation of positions in space gradually transforms the recorded finger snaps into a sounding identity that is characteristic of the position of the microphone in the room.

Since these positionings are performed by the body movements of the performer, the movement sequence transforms into a sounding choreography. Once the finger snaps are transformed into continuous feedback tones, the performer strives to merge and overlap the different identities by gradually reducing the movements or by changing the movement sequence. The performance ends when the articulation of the six different positions has faded into a continuous, polyphonic soundscape.

Variations are possible by changing the position in space, the duration of the cycle or the movement sequence of the performer.