Wind Chimes
"During retreats Thay (Thich Nhat Hanh) encouraged participants to give calm, bright-eyed attention to each daily activity, whether eating a meal, drawing a Buddha, or just walking quietly, aware of the contact between our foot and the earth which supports it. In order to encourage this kind of mindfulness, a 'bell master' sounded a large bell regularly, and everyone stopped their activity, breathed three times, and recited silently, 'Listen, listen, this wonderful sound brings me back to my true self.' 'A bell is a bodhisattva,' Thay said, 'It helps us to wake up.'" (Peter Levitt, 1988)
Windchimes are in their natural state a musical instrument, a percussion instrument, but when augmented with sensors, windchimes become a minimal interface to controlling sound and creating electronic music. A tangible interface to sound performance. Interfaces that are transparent and invisible to the user and that illicit a sense of surprise when used.
Windchimes were the last piece that we developed for the exhibition and in many ways one of the more interesting pieces with a vaired influences which led to the concept being developed. The need to develop this installation came from the Quietplease exhibition itself. The idea was that the exhibition needed an instillation, a piece of work, that would bring people into the entrance of the gallery. The gallery space itself does not have a very well defined entrance and the exhibition space itself, being all black, does not as well have a very well defined entrance. So we wanted something to lure people in from the gallery entrance into the entrance to the exhibition. We wanted a piece specifically for that purpose. So in coming up with the concepts which would fit this use, one of the first ideas I had came from my experience traveling in Thailand and in Nepal; and that is as you enter a temple in Thailand first of all when you are inside the temple itself you walk around in a clockwise motion, touching bells and touching cylindrical shapes as you walk around. But in Chiang Mai in Thailand I believe, at the Doi Sut, that temple, there is at the entrance to the temple a large collection of bells which lead you into the temple.So my first concept was that we could create bells themselves from the entrance to the gallery until the entrance of the exhibition that people would touch and ring as they went through and of course these bells would be augmented with sensors to relay even more digital information. Of course in Buddhist practice ‘Buddha’ means to awaken so the sound of bells and bells themselves are very central to Buddhist practices and these bells that you find generally in these kinds of temples tend to be at least the large ones usually heard in isolation and their sound is actually very very complex and this sound had a very strong influence on the kind of sound I was going to create in this instillation. So generally the smaller bells are less tuned or untuned and are arranged in large sets around temples in Thailand. Devotees strike each bell for forgivness of a sin as they ascend into the temple. I cannot understate the complexity of sound that this creates when they are all rung at the same time. But as we came closer to developing the prototype we realized that the construction of a bell is fairly complex. What we eventually settled on was something which is very common to the surroundings of Taiwan and that is bamboo. Bamboo has a sound when struck all of its own which also, though in a minor sense, fits in well into the concept that we were trying to create. And the idea of windchimes themselves, the action is generally, you gradually from one end to the other will put your hand across the chimes. A very similar action as you would see in the Thai bells. So we settled on using bamboo windchimes in replace of cast iron bells for primarily practical reasons. But I stuck with creating the sound that I remember hearing in these bells in Thailand and Nepal. So that when the people enter the gallery they would touch the windchimes in a forward motion and not only would the sound of the wood hitting one another create sound but the sensors would activate a very complex sounding iron bell influenced sound as well. And when all of these are touched at the same time the sound is very much like what I heard when in Thailand and Nepal.