Pierre Berthet

Sound garden

Instructions to make a sound garden in the last house of Açores, a hamlet (5 inhabitants) at the end of a road in central Portugal (excerpt). This house has three parts. The last part you reach is very small and consists of just one room. It’s now a kitchen but you can put a bed init. It faces a terrace with a stone table on which you can work if it isn’t raining.

You might start by assembling the dead, dry leaves of a palm tree and two empty cans of tomato concentrate–suspending the device in front of the house to the left of the little door and attaching a small motor to it. You could fix a little silicone fan to the motor so that it would hit various parts of the assemblage and shake it. Between some of the old stones that the house’s exterior walls are made from, you will find rusty parts of some old garden tools. You could suspend one of the smaller tools just beside the tomato can assemblage, so that the fan would sometimes hit against that as well, depending on the wind. Wind brings a lot of changes and variations.

Sometimes the fan gets blocked for a few seconds. Put a little bit of butter on the fan if it stays blocked too long orgets blocked too often. Adjust the fan to obtain as many variations in sound as possible. Connect the larger of the two cans to the metal part of the roof with steel wires so that vibrations travel through it. Firmly attach a very thin steel wire to the tomato can, adjusting the length of the wire so that it strikes the stone wall when it is shaken. Somewhere near, you’ll find an old milk bucket in galvanized metal. Suspend it with a metal wire in front of the house to the right of the door, attaching it to the roof so that it is just above the ground.

On the way to Açores from the airport in Porto, on the first highway car park where you canstop, there are some small palm trees from which you can discreetly cut some long, thin, dryleaves–more or less 25cm in length.

Attach them firmly around a small, low-tension motor so that it looks a little like a giant spider. Suspend the spider so that it touches the milk bucket and connect the motor to a microcontroller which can vary the speed of the motor according to variations in tension. You could then cut the + cable (or the-one) of the motor and strip both ends. You could wrap aflat stone in aluminum foil and fix it to the end of the cable that goes to the motor. Attach the other end (the one that goes to the microcontroller) to a fork and suspend this fork above the wrapped stone in such a way that when the fork swings, the stripped end of the cable touchesthe wrapped stone when it passes over. In this way, the contact alternates and the motor switches off and on. When it doesn’t swing, contact is permanent. There’s another milk bucket around, when you find it, you can pierce a tuna-fish can and suspend it from three small, metalwires.

Later in the garden is a disused goat-shelter, made from wood and corrugated iron. You could pierce the roof of the shed with steel wire and suspend a small battery-powered motor from a steel wire. You might pervert the motor with small weights so that it can no longer turn right around. When the motor is switchedon, it will resonate up through the wires and the ironstructure of the goat-shelter. By extending the net of wires or adding other materials from the garden, you could enrich the resonances it creates. You could wrap the motor in some corn leaves, so that will add a soft “frrr” sound to the mix. There are many more things you could do of course, but begin with these and make mistakes. Mistakes are a good way to get different results.

Pierre Berthet is a Belgian artist who studied percussion at the Conservatoire Royal de Musique de Bruxelles and at the Conservatoire Royal de Musique de Liège (improvisation with Garrett List, composition with Frederic Rzewski and music theory with Henri Pousseur). He designs and builds sound objects and installations in natural and built spaces (steel, plastic, water, magnetic fields, etc.) presenting them in exhibitions and in solo or duo performances, with Brigida Romano or Frédéric Le Junter. He played percussion in the Arnold Dreyblatt’s Orchestra of Excited Strings and released three CDs so far: “Un piano cadre prolongé”, “Twopieces continuum” and “Extended loudspeakers”.