For one of the movements of the performance I tasked Zach Patten with composing a piece based on Sympathetic Resonance. I challenged him to only use sounds created and inspired by sympathetic resonance. To collect sounds, we organized a recording session where we explored a few different ways to generate sound using this concept. Since one of the most basic physics demonstrations of sympathetic resonance involves two tuning forks attached to resonance boxes, when one is struck the other will start to vibrate too, we ended up borrowing some tuning forks from the physics department and recorded 33 different tuning forks.

Zach had also developed a way to play brass instruments using compressed air and had recently acquired a couple piano harps. We ended up setting up the piano harps and used five microphones to record them as they were being blasted with a Tuba and a Baritone.

My new favorite instrument is Marbles on Drum. We set up four Sennheiser 421’s (wouldn’t recommend these for this kind of recording as you need a lot of gain, but they were the only microphone we had four of) to record an improvisation of me placing marbles on the drum while finding different resonating frequencies of the drum head to vibrate them.