Have you ever thought about all the little sounds your body makes as it goes about its daily work? Not the audible rumble of a stomach or the crack of an ankle, but the tiny sounds deep inside that we never hear. What about the flapping of our vocal cords that enables us to say “Hello,” or “How are you?” Then there are the interior spaces that are formed — the spaces in the mouth that are created as we speak, eat, and swallow. What do those look like? What sounds does each shape result in?
These are the types of questions that occupy sound artist Tess Oldfield, who is currently a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. “All my work is situated within this obsession I have with reconstructing the human vocal system,” says Oldfield. “How do I ‘Frankenstein’ all these microsounds that are constantly happening?” In their work, Oldfield combines the technical, visual, and musical to bring these vocalizations outside the body, give them form, and make them audible. Essentially, this results in the creation of musical instruments.
Oldfield’s interest in sound and music goes back to their childhood in New Jersey. For all 12 years of grade school, Oldfield was part of a touring choir. In high school, they sang 40 hours a week, and they began college pursuing vocal performance. “It’s really where all my work emerges from,” says Oldfield.
In their early 20s, however, Oldfield put life “on hold” for a time and began taking ceramics classes as a way to find a community. This led them to pursue an undergraduate degree in ceramics; during college, music began to creep back into their life. They became interested in the idea of visualizing sounds through light — casting light through very thin porcelain forms and coding them to resemble mouths.
As an M.F.A. student at the Rhode Island School of Design in the digital media department, Oldfield delved deeper into the world of sound and technology, learning about coding, DIY hardware, and kinetic sculpture. This was when Oldfield began work on the first iteration of a project that still occupies them today, an installation piece titled “Pitch Pipe Choir.”
Pitch pipes, Oldfield says, are the paraphernalia of singers — small, round, harmonica-like objects that include one octave of notes and give the starting pitch of a song. “It’s a tool, not an instrument, but I am interested in making it an instrument,” Oldfield says.
Two different pitch pipes are made by a company called Kratt, which happens to operate out of Edison, N.J., not far from where Oldfield grew up. The pitches these two pipes produce are similarly aligned to treble voices. “I’m interested in that,” says Oldfield, “because I’m interested in composing music that is related to my memories of singing in children’s choirs.”
Composing is exactly what Oldfield is doing. The Pitch Pipe Choir is made up of multiple “pipes” constructed from a metal stand and rod with a glass bulb, a pitch pipe connected to a motor, and an attached tube through which compressed air is moved. The glass bulbs provide visual tension — an organic form amidst the wires and valves — as well as a place for the air pressure to be released before it reaches the pitch pipe. Oldfield blew the bulbs herself and then let them collapse into abstract forms naturally as they cooled — a kind of visual manifestation of breath.
Oldfield controls which note each pipe plays using software that they have coded. The pipes rotate to the note that Oldfield’s code indicates, and the movement of compressed air produces a sound. An important distinction for Oldfield is that, while they built a digital coded system to play the instrument, the sound being produced is not digital but analogue. They refer to this as “digital extensions for analogue systems.”
Each pipe gets its own score, so no two are creating the same sounds at the same time. Recently, Oldfield has been experimenting with a medieval composition technique called hocket, in which a melody is split up among several voices. The idea of medieval music being played through “futuristic instruments” intrigues Oldfield.
To create a composition, Oldfield either writes their own music or takes already written music and rearranges it to work for their choir. The sound the choir makes is haunting, like a series of slightly shivering horns periodically interrupted by the clicks and pops of the valves.
Creating a composition involves reading sheet music and turning it into code, an arduous process that is particularly challenging because code is not built to be expressive. “The constant battle in my practice is the tension and impossible nature of mechanical time and musical time,” says Oldfield. “Putting musical time into computational language is extremely hard.” But it’s a challenge that Oldfield enjoys day after day.
That’s not to say, though, that Oldfield isn’t interested in making other instruments and machines. For the FAWC fellows show at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum this winter, Oldfield made an instrument for the piano that resides permanently in the gallery. The instrument consisted of 12 motors and custom hammers that Oldfield attached to strings on the inside of the piano, the intention being to bring viewers inside the instrument, a space that is normally inaccessible to someone attending a performance.
“All of these projects I think of as performers and performances, so they don’t play continuously,” says Oldfield. The piano at PAAM played its tune every 20 minutes and likewise with various renditions of “Pitch Pipe Choir.”
In addition to this instrument, which Oldfield says can be fit onto any Steinway piano, they have also been using their time in Provincetown to do research for another new instrument related to breath. They have been tinkering with mockups of bellows that have the same volume as human lungs — something that is very math intensive, they note — and experimenting with materials that they can use to replicate this essential human process.
“There’s nothing immediate about my practice,” Oldfield laughs. “Everything is very long term, and often annoying.” That’s the way they like it, though. Talking fondly of the Pitch Pipe Choir project, Oldfield says, “This is my choir, and I’ll probably be working on it until I die.”
Replicating the Voice
The event: Works by Tess Oldfield and Michael Waugh
The time: April 17 to 26; opening Friday, April 17, 5 p.m. to 8 p.m.
The place: The Hudson D. Walker Gallery, Fine Arts Work Center, 24 Pearl St., Provincetown
The cost: Free