Lucia H Chung
I enjoyed Lucia’s lecture and enjoyed seeing the thought process behind their pieces, especially 2pm and how they recorded the environment beforehand to get an idea of the sonic spectrum, then changed their work to line up with this so their pieces would not impose onto the environment.
One piece that Lucia talked about which gained my attention was 4 Rooms by Jacob Kirkegaard.
“This work is a sonic presentation of four deserted rooms inside the ‘Zone of Alienation in Chernobyl, Ukraine, recorded in October 2005. Jacob Kirkegaard deliberately picked rooms that were once active meeting points for people. … By listening to the silence of the four radiating spaces he aims to unlock a fragment of the time existing inside the zone.
In each room he made a recording of 10 minutes and then played the recording back into the room, recording it again. This process was repeated up to ten times. As the layers got denser, each room slowly began to unfold a drone with various overtones.”
Bandcamp description of 4 Rooms.
I wanted to attempt this myself, as I felt immersed in his work. I did what the description says, recording the room, playing it back and recording it around 10 times to amplify the room sound. Unfortunately, I couldn’t recreate it to the same degree and barely sounded anything like Kirkegaard’s. The two reasons I believe this happened are the type of microphone I am using, being an SM58 (cardioid microphone) which only picks up noise near it and the distance between the speaker and the microphone, as I was dealing with interference. For this, a microphone that picks up more of the room, such as a diaphragm mic, would be necessary (unluckily I only have one microphone) and set the speaker with the microphone on opposite ends of the room.