Of Wood, Steel, and Cloth

Of Wood, Steel, and Cloth was inspired by Alvin Lucier’s I am Sitting In a Room. Whereas the original piece featured the impulse of a voice reading a prepared text in the feedback system of a room, I opted for a through-composed electroacoustic feedback loop using a surface exciter speaker, a microphone, and a harp. Choosing between plucking and vibrating the strings helps to keep the piece dynamic and unpredictable, whereas each on its own might let the audience settle into one mode of listening. The microphone and exciter were placed within socks to shield them from high-frequency buzzing when contacting the harp's wood. By running the microphone through a voice changer for real-time chorus, reverb, and treble cuts, the system could be induced into feedback loops with a slow onset and reduce the tendency towards painful screeching. The homemade harp, based on a Chinese guzheng, was tuned to a D major pentatonic scale, which has more harmonic intonation than a diatonic scale. Thus multiple strings can be excited into sympathetic resonance when a lower string is plucked and the audio exciter is pressed into some higher strings close to the nut. The microphone was placed inside the harp body, which was less than optimal because it dampened the harp’s acoustic vibrations, but it was the best way to emphasize bass frequencies over treble in the feedback system. Since it was recorded in mono (and for some reason only had positive signal amplitude), delay and reverb were added in post, as well as limiting and compression to reign in the feedback volume. Some volume segments were manually adjusted to keep the compressing more dynamic.