In a Room: Feedback Studies for microphone and Loudspeaker

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Why we want to work with the label.

Amacher

Installation - gallery/mutliple rooms like Amacher

Writing

These studies are solely of audio feedback created when a microphone is pointed towards speakers. Our aim was to capture something slight and fragile away from the more familiar exponential squeals and howls, to explore the twilight state between murmur and silence. We didn’t play any sound through the speakers so that one is only ever hearing the resonance of the room folding back onto itself.

The feedback was recorded live in single takes using EQ and volume automation to bend the room’s resonance into melody, percussion as well as stranger, more unknown sounds. Moving the microphone around the speaker and walls also allowed further abstraction.

We recorded the music in three different locations, two in cities and one deep in rural devon in rooms which enabled us to record quietly. Inevitably, the ambient sounds of weather and surrounding atmosphere bled into the recordings, resonating back through the microphone and becoming part of the music. In two instances (III and XII), we reintroduced these room recordings into a forest using a portable speaker — during the day near a stream, and at night — to hear how the forest might mix the room’s resonance into its own.

Through the process we found ways to layer sounds live, including 4 voice chords, but on occasion we overdubbed where it was not possible for two sounds to coexist in the room. In some of the pieces, artificial reverb and distortion were added as part of the signal chain and captured live.