Nestled among a block of rowhomes and a group of studios on Oliver Street in Baltimore’s Station North arts district, Lyn Goeringer is creating her next immersive sound installation. In a room of drywall and concrete, she’s tweaking sounds that she hopes will help people get back to nature and their childlike curiosity.
In Finally it was just me and the katydids, inspired by the green, grasshopper-like insects she hears on visits back to her hometown of Indian Springs, Colorado, Goeringer uses motion-tracking and machine learning to simulate encountering the katydids in nature. In a gallery space, the sounds will never be heard where people are standing, but instead where they are not, as the insect makes sounds for mating, to defend territory, or deter predators.
“I want people to start to think about insects differently,” says classically trained pianist Goeringer, an assistant professor of computer music at Peabody. “And how the environment and insects and other animals survive and thrive. I really want to find a way to build a piece where people can start to find a sense of wonder in bugs, like you do when you’re a kid.”
The catch? The audio that will envelop people as they experience the installation will all originate from one side of the room. Goeringer built four Baltic birch boxes that each hold eight small speakers, and used software to manipulate the physics of sound to achieve a surround-sound effect.
The project is made possible by a Johns Hopkins Catalyst Award, a grant given to early career faculty members to help launch their careers. She plans to have a video component with the installation as well.
The catch? The audio that will envelop people as they experience the installation will all originate from one side of the room. Goeringer built four Baltic birch boxes that each hold eight small speakers, and used software to manipulate the physics of sound to achieve a surround-sound effect.
The project is made possible by a Johns Hopkins Catalyst Award, a grant given to early career faculty members to help launch their careers. She plans to have a video component with the installation as well.
This upcoming piece is just one of dozens of examples of Peabody faculty members and alumni creating aural work that goes far beyond sound and music, creating visual and perceptual experiences where sight and sound are married synergistically and become inseparable—one and the same.
United in its creators’ inventiveness, this diverse,disparate output sees these artists carving out their own visual-sonic signatures. Whether it’s instruments of their own invention—including turning the human body into an instrument, recontextualized traditional western instruments, or software and robotics—these unconventional methods are mediums for performance art, audio-video feedback systems, soundtracks, and installations, and creating one-of-a-kind experiences in which the sound, perceptual elements, and architecture of the space come together in a cohesive presentation.
“I want spaces to become alive,” Goeringer says. “I want it to be a transformative and magical experience to be there. I want you—the viewer, the listener—to be elsewhere. And not necessarily outside of that room, but I want to create spaces and pieces where we step outside of ourselves, our usual experience, and we really get to experience something else.”
Tools of the Trade
To create otherworldly, transformative experiences, one requires otherworldly instruments.
Peabody alum Qiujiang Levi Lu (MM ’23, Computer Music), who teaches musical interfaces and robotics and music production at the University of Pennsylvania, gestures wildly during performances, using robotics, in-body microphones, and feedback systems to create sound and explore the relationships between humans and technology.
“You’re seeing the performer on stage playing, and their body gestures matter so much,” Lu says. “That contributes visually to the sounds, which sounds contradictory because they’re two different senses, but they work together for the audience perception.”
In Metanoia, a piece about the body dysmorphia Lu feels as a nonbinary person, they use a sensor to pick up the vibrations of drumsticks beating their body, and a custom waterproof in-mouth speaker that creates feedback with their headset microphone. The choreographed performance includes a mylar wall Lu eventually destroys and wraps themself in.
The laptop also becomes an instrument. In a solo percussion piece, Before It Gets Too Late, which is a meditation on the negative effects of technology on humans, an amplified laptop is destroyed in front of the audience using mallets, a hammer, and a saw.
In Metanoia, a piece about the body dysmorphia Lu feels as a nonbinary person, they use a sensor to pick up the vibrations of drumsticks beating their body, and a custom waterproof in-mouth speaker that creates feedback with their headset microphone. The choreographed performance includes a mylar wall Lu eventually destroys and wraps themself in.
The laptop also becomes an instrument. In a solo percussion piece, Before It Gets Too Late, which is a meditation on the negative effects of technology on humans, an amplified laptop is destroyed in front of the audience using mallets, a hammer, and a saw.
“A lot of my work centers around creating a unique live performance that you can’t get anywhere else,” says Lu, who co-created the student-run electronic music concert series VVAVES and the experimental Peabody Improvisers Collective while a student. “The idea of watching someone destroy a laptop in front of you is different than watching someone destroy it through your iPhone or TV screen. It’s like, ‘Come see Levi’s show, what’s the next thing that’s going to happen?’”
For Ted Moore, a member of the computer music faculty, the focus is also on defining his own artistry. He considers his work “intermedia”—it’s not music, it’s not video; the fusion creates a third kind of media. He writes his own software programs, using programming language such as SuperCollider and open-source coding tools. The software analyzes visual data and turns it into sound—or analyzes sound and turns it into visuals.
“It’s not that they’re parallel, the artistry and the technology, and it’s not that one is more important than the other,” he says. “It’s that they are causes unto each other. I pursued this idiosyncratic technology because I think it gives me a distinct artistic voice.”
In his piece Saccades, a saxophone player performs a score in front of a large projector screen showing soundwaves, fragmented shapes, and images of the eyeball as electronic sounds play—synthesized noise and glitches—all synced together. Moore uses machine-learning algorithms to have parts where the audio drives the visual elements, and times where the video dictates the electronic sounds.
A saccade is the movement of the eye between two points of fixation. “While that motion is happening, which takes a few milliseconds, the brain is actually blind to anything that might be happening,” Moore says. “Saccades is meant to imitate the media environment that we’re saturated with, so many images and news stories and notifications. . . . Our attention is constantly ‘saccading’ to different places, we’re probably missing a lot of important information.”
Another video feedback piece, Still Motion, involves live sampling of a percussionist. While Moore’s composition is played, a mirror image of equal size with the performer is projected, with audio and video being manipulated and played back in real time. “That piece is an immediate sort of conversation,” he says.
Deconstruction and Reconstruction
In a way, Wendel Patrick is also creating his own instruments like Lu, Moore, and Goeringer. Unlike them, he aims to make them sound as much like real instruments as possible. He uses digital audio workstation Ableton Live, a Nord keyboard, and a turntable to sample records. Also a classically trained pianist, Patrick leads Peabody’s Bachelor of Music in Hip Hop program, the first performance bachelor’s degree dedicated entirely to hip-hop.
“One of the things that I love to do as part of my practice is see how I can make things from scratch that sound as close to the original as possible,” he says. “I have a seemingly infinite number of virtual instruments that I can play and tweak.”
One of Patrick’s forays into melding the sonic and the visual came in 2023 when he created the soundscape to accompany The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art, an exhibit organized by the Saint Louis Art Museum and the Baltimore Museum of Art that showcased hip-hop’s influence on art and fashion and launched in the year that marked the 50th anniversary of hip-hop. Patrick created a seamless, nearly nonstop soundtrack that moves through turntable scratches, jazz interludes, funk basslines, breakbeats, and orchestral textures as some of the era’s most prominent MCs—from Eric B. and Rakim to Run-DMC to Public Enemy—say their piece.
Patrick found the original songs that hip-hop artists sampled and recreated the samples himself, sometimes extending them, while adding original material of his own. “People could almost be in the mind of the producers as they were making those songs and listening to the source material,” he says. “[It was] sort of an homage to the development of the technology over time and how it can be used to tell a story.”
For a section in which the music eventually arrives at Eric B. and Rakim’s “Don’t Sweat the Technique,” he recorded an improvised upright bass line in the style of the song’s sampled bass line. That plays as Rakim reads a section from his autobiography. Before going into the actual song, Patrick teases its two foundational samples, Kool and the Gang’s “Give It Up,” which gave the hip-hop smash its horn line, and Young-Holt Unlimited’s “Queen of the Nile,” which gave the song its funky upright bass line.
Patrick, who was on the advisory committee forthe exhibit, got to watch people move through the exhibit with the music when it was in Baltimore, reacting to familiar musical passages that shifted in unexpected ways.
The 22-minute piece—which he later doubled in length to add a Canadian hip-hop section for the exhibit’s showing in Toronto—was a balancing act for Patrick. He worked to ensure it enhanced the museumgoers’ experience, not becoming a distraction, but being very present so as to not become background music.
Space and Time
Patrick considers that balancing act a responsibility that he and his colleagues use to inform the work—maintaining an artistic voice while creating a cohesive presentation in which the sound and space work as one.
For Lu, that means taking the acoustics and shape of the venues into consideration, which could inspire the use of multi-channel sound systems or projections. “Whenever the audience enters a live performance space, that person’s experience has already changed fundamentally,” Lu says. “The audience is so valuable to me. The time someone takes to commute to see my work just means a lot to me and I don’t want to let them down.”
Moore says this type of work inspires a certain focus—the direct relationship between the audio and visual components enhances the experience of both. “As a viewer, it sort of short circuits my brain and makes me pay attention in a different way,” he says. “Maybe I’m trying to understand the relationship . . . or noticing [things] I wouldn’t have noticed before.”
What brings all of this work together for Goeringer is the artists’ “endless curiosity about the medium that [they’re] working in,” she says, and how people, time, and space interact. The moments, seconds, minutes, hours people spend with these works, in these spaces, should create singular experiences.
“I want you to be hyperaware of that moment in time,” she says, “of that space in time, of that sound in time.”