A piece exploring resonant frequencies; plucking a string makes a cymbal vibrate, and striking a cymbal makes a string vibrate.
The Earth vibrates at a frequency of 7.8 Hertz. Tuning forks can be used to tell time. A stretched-out Slinky can be used to produce a Star Wars-style laser-blast sound.
These are just a handful of the fascinating factoids included in “Vibration Variations,” a new sound-art installation exhibit currently on view in Southern Connecticut State University’s Lyman Center Art Gallery. The exhibit, which runs until May 6, blends together pictures, charts, text, interactive artworks, and sound to create a multisensory immersion in the aural, physical, psychological, cultural, and aesthetic aspects of vibration.
Visitors learn what Einstein and Tesla had to say about the fundamentally vibratory nature of physical reality. An enormous chart lays out the spectrum of audible vibrations and beyond, ascending from bass rumbles to gamma rays. Visitors can also play a prepared piano, make pew-pew sounds with the blaster-Slinky machine, learn about the auditory innovations of John Cage and David Byrne, and get to hear what it sounds like when the steel mattress support from a crib is played with a violin bow. (It’s creepy.)
Randy Laist Photo
Skinner.
“Vibration Variations” is the brainchild of Mike Skinner, an associate professor of theater at SCSU who also serves as chairperson for the Department of Theater. Skinner received an MFA in theatrical sound design from Yale, and his interest in vibrations is deeply connected to a lifelong fascination with sound itself. His lifetime of experience — performing in church choirs and local bands, school plays and community theater groups, college drama labs and avant-garde “rockperettas” — has fueled his speculations regarding the intimate connection between sound and psychology.
Skinner’s exploration of vibrations also allows him to connect the nature of sound to fields as diverse as geophysics, tantric meditation practices, electrical engineering, and urban planning. Ultimately, his research has convinced him that musician Frank Zappa’s Big Note Theory may be right: that “everything in the universe is … made up of a note, a single note.”
The space of the Lyman lobby provides an appropriately ambient and echoing setting for Skinner’s installation. As visitors read about the various kinds of vibrations that affect us, pinging, droning, and buzzing sounds, generated by the various interactive vibrating devices arranged around the space, bounce around the concrete walls, subtly influencing our moods and thought processes in real time.
The sound devices themselves are also striking works of art, including the whimsically skeletal prepared piano and a gridwork decorated with defunct musical instruments that have been repurposed to resonate in response to specific frequencies. The whole experience activates the brain simultaneously in a dozen different ways, creating intersecting ripples of curiosity and inspiration that, like the sustained resonance of one of the cymbals in Skinner’s exhibit, continue to linger in the mind long after leaving the lobby.
In fact, coming out of the lobby on a bright sunlit day, I couldn’t help considering the light glinting off the leaves, the sounds of the birds, the itch in my left arm, and even the activity of my own consciousness as different expressions of Zappa’s Big Note.
“Vibration Variations” is on display in Lyman Center Art Gallery at Southern Connecticut State University through May 6. Interacting listening hours are Monday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.