Debra Restored Artwork

Please watch the video to hear the sound: https://vimeo.com/140706953 Almost 8 years ago my mother took her own life. It affected me in all the ways you can imagine. It was both an emotional and physical struggle for many years. Part of what made this time so profound for me is that, unlike most suicides, she took care to leave me a recording just prior to the event. I didn’t know it at the time, but this recording would become my reluctant companion in life. For years it remained unheard since the night everything had happened. It traveled with me from city to city, haunting me from the case I kept it in. There it sat, always visible from wherever I was, but never listened to. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. The finality of it is what I dwelled on. I realized that this recording was the most reviled object in my life, but also my greatest treasure. It was the last record of my mother’s love, but also her confession. It was a tangible memory of the worst day of my life and simultaneously a lifeline for hearing my mother’s last words to me anytime I needed them. While I desperately wanted to hear her voice again, I couldn’t bear the words. I needed a way to hear them without understanding. It would be around this time that I was introduced to Rachmaninov’s Piano Roll recordings. It wasn’t that piano rolls were new to me, but what I didn’t understand was how they were made and used in this particular case. You see, during Rachmaninov’s lifetime, he preserved some of his music using a piano that had the ability to capture his strokes; all the notes he played both in pitch, pressure, and duration onto paper rolls. Unlike an audio recording, these rolls could be placed in another player piano to cause it to play the same strokes – just as they had been played 100 years earlier – but now resurrected as live frequencies and not just repeated sounds from a recording. It was such a substantial difference that there was a series of concerts in which a player piano sat on a stage by itself in front of an audience who listened to Rachmaninov play again, this time with the piano bench empty. There was something special about hearing the “live” music, as though he were there. Really, it was more of a transmission through time, a way for the composer come back to us and play on. I had to listen to the recording again. This time, with years between the person who I was and the one became, I listened again with new ears. I learned that the human voice, specifically speech, is comprised of specific frequency combinations (like musical chords) that help us discern vowel sounds in language. It would appear there was a way to disassemble words, a voice. I used special techniques to “take apart” the final 5 words on that recording and discover those fundamental frequencies. I found twelve for every word. With this start, I set out to make a voice portrait of my mother, specifically of her final 5 words to me, from that recording, as a piano roll. I would make sculpture that could play only those frequencies I found. It would play them as “live” frequencies and not just a recording; It needed to be a transmission. That is how I conceived of and created the sound sculpture Debra Restored. This work consists of an array of hand-made tuning forks – each tuned to the specific frequency I located in voice of my mother. In order to give the tuning forks a voice, I use the concept of sympathetic vibration in the form of magnets and solenoids, using sine waves to push and pull the magnets attached to the tuning forks to the same frequencies they were tuned to. This is done by utilizing electronics embedded in the cabinet below the tuning forks. No electronic artifice is visible form the outside. Finally, the cabinet itself is a natural amplifier, utilizing a double-sided acoustic chamber for each battery of tuning forks. The 5 separate groups of tuning forks sound together, one after another, to complete the phrase. After a moment, the loop continues on. In this way, the work becomes a beacon – sounding for as long as it takes for others to hear it and come. A large part of this work was in finding a way of re-curating my mother’s final words - stripping them of their intent - but preserving their meaning as pure frequency. This work became an eternal torch for me, and a way for me to finally be able to mourn my mother. It also created a way for others to connect to the work, and to me. We all have people we miss, or will miss, and I like to think this is a more optimistic way to think about death. To my delight, I found that others did to. Please watch the video to hear the sound: https://vimeo.com/140706953

Mixed Media:Sound on Steel

Original:One-of-a-kind Artwork

Size:59.8 W x 65 H x 24 D in

Delivery Time:Typically 5-7 business days for domestic shipments, 10-14 business days for international shipments.