I’ve written before about how the earth makes music: the deep flute-like tones produced by volcanoes, Japanese instruments that use falling water to create music, sound sculptures triggered by geologic phenomenon… Gerhard Trimpin, a German-born sound artist who lives in Seattle, has designed installations over the years that use nature and the earth to produce music. An early piece was a water fountain in which drops of water, timed in complex rhythmic fugues, dripped into glass receptacles. More recently, he was inspired by a Seattle earthquake.
Wired reporter Hugh Hart describes how Trimpin tuned in to the sonic chaos that ensued. “I had tympani hanging on a catwalk that started to move back and forth, got out of control, and smashed to the floor,” Trimpin recalled. That was the inspiration to use seismic data as musical material.
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Tags: art, nature, percussion by Jon O
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A musical theme park? Please, tell me no. I thought this was a parody when I stumbled upon it online, but sadly, it’s not. It’s hard to figure out exactly what Freestyle Music Park, located in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, is designed to be — some minotaur-like cross between an entertainment complex and a theme park, for certain — but what is the point? Many of the rides feature musical connections: for instance, “Monstars of Rock,” a “monsterific reunion concert with all your favorite dearly departed rock stars” (!); “Get Off of My Cloud,” where eight “festively colored balloon baskets” ascend to the heavens (perhaps with Stones to help you plummet back to earth?); and “Ring My Bell,” a collection of traditional midway games “with a unique musical twist.” Of course, there’s also a Guitar Hero Arcade. [Read more →]
In the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. hangs a work by Picasso titled simply “The Guitar.” It consists of drawings on two overlapping pieces of paper — one dark and one light — floating against a sand-colored background, with a piece of twine strung around protruding nails. A thin band of vermilion bisects the piece, sloping upward to the right and counteracting the overlapping planes of paper that exert a downward pull. Like the artist’s other sculptures and paintings that feature guitars, this 1926 piece deconstructs the instrument, but it does so with such simplicity and elegance that it’s easy to overlook it in the context of its more famous cousins. 
During an imperial tour of Egypt in 129 A.D., the emperor Hadrian visited the singing statute of Memnon at Thebes, a well-known spot in the Mediterranean world where the colossal seated figure of a pharaoh was known to sing at dawn. Greek and Roman tourists named the statue after Memnon, the Trojan hero who sang to his mother each morning at dawn. The statue lost its top half during an earthquake in 27 B.C., and thereafter began producing a strange sound “very like the twanging of a broken lyre string or harp string.” It is believed that the sound was caused by the sun’s rays heating cracks in the stone. Unfortunately, in the third century A.D., Septimus Severus had the statue restored, and it has been silent ever since. 
