Early thoughts on portfolio pieces

After my first lesson back, I instantly had inspiration on what to do. While my ideas are not set in stone, the ideas I’ve had should hopefully lead to better and more creative ideas. While I have 2 projects to create, ill focus on one first and once that’s developed, move on to the next one.

When thinking back to previous years and what I had the most fun doing, my most immediate answer would be the exhibition unit, where I created a sound sculpture (link to blog posts). The most enjoyable part for me was putting it together and seeing it work for the first time, shortly followed by creating this concept. Because of this, I would like to make another sound sculpture. One issue I’m running into already is that I’m happy with my “Metal Forest” sculpture and will lean into a project that is similar in some regard.

My first idea is to have an obelisk, probably made of concrete, with transducers on the inside to resonate the sound. while I believe this could be quite impressive visually, it would be an extremely hard task to make something like this, especially on the scale I want. Along with that, it would probably be too similar to my previous sculpture, using surface transducers on a surface that shouldn’t make sounds or drones. Overall, an impractical idea, but would be amazing to pull off.

Another idea I have is to make a bench, either out of metal or wood, and have it resonate using surface transducers. This was inspired by Timo Kahlens SWARM (#). But I want this bench to be usable and play sound in bursts, so as to surprise anyone sitting on it. An issue with this idea is if it will resonate well, as it will be on the floor. I could make a suspended bench using chains, but that would look too intrusive. Another idea is to make something like a tensegrity table, where it’s suspended from the ground. This would look extremely impressive but I’m not sure about the weight limit of a bench like this. Another issue is this isn’t a good standalone sound sculpture, but works well with other art pieces as it’s replacing an art gallery’s bench.

Using AI imaging, it created this weird mess of steel and cables, creating a weird tensegrity sculpture? I like this as a sculpture, but I’ll think about how this could be sonified.

My final first idea, which is different to the others, is to make an instrument. I have previously designed a piano-like instrument, but with a smaller harp. I attempted to create something like this years ago but stopped because of the amount of work. This is inspired by Sami Elu’s Chopstick Piano (link) where he has a zither-like instrument with keys on top to play it like a piano, but with open strings on the side to play it like a koto. While he does have build videos on his channel, they don’t go into details about his chopstick piano. In his more recent build of his pixiechord (a newer version of the chopstick piano), he talks about the instrument in detail (link) with build videos. While I would love to make this instrument, I feel like I would just reproduce what he’s doing. If I was going to make something, I would want it to be new. Meaning if I was to make something like this, I would also want to upcycle it into existence.