Almost 8 years ago my mother took her own life. It affected
me in all the ways you can imagine. It was both an emotional and physical
struggle for many years. Part of what made this time so profound for me is
that, unlike most suicides, she took care to leave me a recording just prior to
the event. I didn’t know it at the time, but this recording would become my
reluctant companion in life. For years it remained unheard since the night
everything had happened. It traveled with me from city to city, haunting me
from the case I kept it in.
There it sat, always visible from wherever I was, but never
listened to.
I couldn’t stop thinking about it. The finality of it is
what I dwelled on. I realized that this recording was the most reviled object
in my life, but also my greatest treasure. It was the last record of my
mother’s love, but also her confession. It was a tangible memory of the worst
day of my life and simultaneously a lifeline for hearing my mother’s last words
to me anytime I needed them. While I desperately wanted to hear her voice
again, I couldn’t bear the words. I needed a way to hear them without
understanding.
It would be around this time that I was introduced to
Rachmaninov’s Piano Roll recordings. It wasn’t that piano rolls were new to me,
but what I didn’t understand was how they were made and used in this particular
case. You see, during Rachmaninov’s lifetime, he preserved some of his music
using a piano that had the ability to capture his strokes; all the notes he
played both in pitch, pressure, and duration onto paper rolls. Unlike an audio recording,
these rolls could be placed in another player piano to cause it to play the
same strokes – just as they had been played 100 years earlier – but now
resurrected as live frequencies and not just repeated sounds from a recording.
It was such a substantial difference that there was a series of concerts in
which a player piano sat on a stage by itself in front of an audience who
listened to Rachmaninov play again, this time with the piano bench empty. There
was something special about hearing the “live” music, as though he were there.
Really, it was more of a transmission through time, a way for the composer come
back to us and play on.
I had to listen to the recording again.
This time, with years between the person who I was and the
one became, I listened again with new ears. I learned that the human voice,
specifically speech, is comprised of specific frequency combinations (like
musical chords) that help us discern vowel sounds in language. It would appear
there was a way to disassemble words, a voice. I used special techniques to
“take apart” the final 5 words on that recording and discover those fundamental
frequencies. I found twelve for every word. With this start, I set out to make
a voice portrait of my mother, specifically of her final 5 words to me, from
that recording, as a piano roll. I would make sculpture that could play only
those frequencies I found. It would play them as “live” frequencies and not
just a recording; It needed to be a transmission. That is how I conceived of
and created the sound sculpture Debra Restored.
This work consists of an array of hand-made tuning forks –
each tuned to the specific frequency I located in voice of my mother. In order
to give the tuning forks a voice, I use the concept of sympathetic vibration in
the form of magnets and solenoids, using sine waves to push and pull the
magnets attached to the tuning forks to the same frequencies they were tuned
to. This is done by utilizing electronics embedded in the cabinet below the
tuning forks. No electronic artifice is visible form the outside. Finally, the
cabinet itself is a natural amplifier, utilizing a double-sided acoustic chamber for each battery
of tuning forks. The 5 separate groups of tuning forks sound together, one
after another, to complete the phrase. After a moment, the loop continues on.
In this way, the work becomes a beacon – sounding for as long as it takes for
others to hear it and come.
A large part of this work was in finding a way of
re-curating my mother’s final words - stripping them of their intent - but
preserving their meaning as pure frequency. This work became an eternal torch
for me, and a way for me to finally be able to mourn my mother. It also created
a way for others to connect to the work, and to me. We all have people we miss,
or will miss, and I like to think this is a more optimistic way to think about
death. To my delight, I found that others did to.
Please watch the video to hear the sound: https://vimeo.com/140706953
