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Knots & Donuts

Knots & Donuts sound sculpture performance at Tate Modern, part of Topology series (19-20.11.11), was a 7-performance ticketed event. It was also installed at Khoj International Artists’ Association, New Delhi (2013) and at Rutgers, Caribbean Sounds Conference (2013), and discussed in J. Henriques, “Hearing Things and Dancing Numbers” Theory, Culture & Society, 29 (4/5) 2012.

The research aim of the sculpture is to provide qualitative evidence, in the form of listeners’ questions and written comments, on how auditory shapes and images are recognized in the “mind’s ear.” This is a practical way of testing some of the ideas and findings on the Jamaican reggae dancehall music scene, reported in Sonic Bodies. Both book and sculpture are concerned with embodied, and often tacit, ways of knowing. Derived from auditory – rather than visual – sensation, they provide useful examples of haptic understanding, as audition often escapes representation. Thus the research methodology calls for an exploration of acoustic space, as distinct from its visual counterpart, to explore how far geometry might be understood through the enminded body, rather than the more traditional mathematical or disembodied mind.

The sound sculpture is performed within a 360-degree 3D auditory field produced by 12 channels of high quality sound, whose output is configured to fill the room. Within this sound field, using state-of-the-art software, it is possible to specify the position of up to 16 sound sources and control their travel anywhere in this space (plus their conventional parameters: pitch, volume and timbre). Thus shapes can be “drawn” in sound (like a sparkler firework draws in light) in the 3D space in which the listener is immersed. The geometrical shapes of the sculpture included circles the topological figures of the Borromean Knot and the Torus (Donut). The sculpture sensitized listeners to sound as a creative medium.