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SONIC ROOM: It's ironic that
after twenty years and several degrees, former chamber musician and
composer Jeff Talman would turn to silence to make his most compelling
music, I mean soundspaces. This month, his newest installation - RADIANT POINT ONE - inaugurates the Tang Museum,
designed by Antoine Predock for Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs,
New York.
Talman (www.jefftalman.com) uses the standing waves - the so-called
room tone - of a space to create multichannel, site-specific pieces
often alternately described as absolutely bewildering and heavenly. He
begins by recording a room's silence, then runs it through a sonogram
analysis program designed by Swiss programmer Martin Hairer. The output
(pictured here) shows those frequencies that resonate the best. These
are then imported into a digital audio editing program that Talman has
tweaked to produce neck-twisting eight-channel extravaganzas. He calls
the result sonic architecture.
"If you're good at listening, you can hear actual 'sound objects'
coming into being in space and then moving through the room," says
Talman. "I wouldn't call it music. It's way beyond that."
--Paul Bennett, WIRED Magazine, October 2000
New York braces for blackouts as the city's premiere digital art
gallery turns on Jeff Talman's 24-channel sound sculpture.
-- WIRED Magazine, October 2002
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