Speaker Swinging
1st performance: Mercer Union, Toronto, 1982
Speaker Swinging is an experiment for three or more swinging loudspeakers and nine audio oscillators in an enclosed space. The idea comes from hearing such things as Leslie speakers, moving vehicles with broadcasting sound systems, airplanes, and other moving sound sources, both industrial and organic. The subsequent acoustical processes of phasing, vibrato, and tremolo are fundamental to the work, as are the elements of sweat, struggle, fear, and seduction.
Speaker Swinging grew out of a desire to animate the typical electronic music concert and in effect, to realise the loudspeaker as a valid electronic music instrument in itself.
The rotary speaker motion and the corresponding Doppler shifts can become metaphors for the molecular movements of electrons that occur within solid state tremolo and vibrato circuits. It mimics these miniature processes that not long ago were modeled on human-scale mechanical-acoustic systems. By making reference to the atomic, it necessarily acknowledges the celestial.
Speaker Swinging was first inspired by hearing Trans Am automobiles cruising on a hot summer night with Heavy Metal blaring out of the windows. As the cars cruised by, there was that fleeting moment of wet, fluid music, when one tonality melts into another.
©Gordon Monahan 1982
