Speaker-instruments are a category I created to refer to objects I have been developing that both reproduce and distort a sound signal. Speaker-instruments are electromagnetic transducers made from a range of materials, the most recent of which are porcelain, copper and magnets.
These works are investigations into sound-as-energy and its kinetic, vibro-tactile and transformative qualities. By unpacking the conventional audio speaker designed for control, reproduction and predictability, the assemblages that forms these speaker-instruments are given voice, foregrounding their energetic ecologies and leaving open a chance for human entanglement into the process of transduction.
Below are instruments, installations and performances in this body of work.
Speaker Release (2024)
Solo Exhibition. Trafo Center for Contemporary Art, Szczecin Poland. Documentation video below.
In the work that makes up this installation, Gräf enters into dialogue with energies of sound and what they perform in her non-conventional approach to instrument design, sound and representation. In a time when energy, work, and labor in society is often masked or considered unconsciously, this exhibition deals with exposing and working with energies consciously.
Presented here are speaker-instruments, hand-built porcelain forms developed over several years of experimentation that express energies variously – through their movement, audible sound, and vibration. By unpacking the conventional audio speaker to reveal its ‘guts’ the artist embraces their resulting ‘noise’ and interferences, a result of exposure to a broader and unpredictable ecosystems of influence. What is exposed are the mechanisms of work that typically go unnoticed in modern speakers and instruments. Gräf pushes back against the slick modern interfaces that privilege control and domination over energy as well as blind us to an extractive mindset. Speaker-Instruments collapse the binary of the supposed function of audio speaker/sound source. They reproduce sound, while introducing their own unique voice. Each assemblage of magnets, porcelain, copper wire, wood and electric signal incorporates distinct tonality, distortion, acoustics, and kinetic movement – characteristics that occur out of encounters between energy and material and through negotiation.
Gräf has created a composition for this installation of speaker-instruments, choreographing the movement of energies across the speakers in the gallery space to work with their various expressions of such energy. The sound one hears, feels, sees is the energetic transformation between the material and immaterial realms. By working with sound as energy she hopes to emphasize a non-normative approach to listening – one that takes into consideration the multi-sensory aspects of listening and sounding. Attending and tending to energies she has in these assemblages, her work places emphasis on the mechanisms translation and transduction occurring through the various assemblages and spilling out into the bodies that perceive them. Never pure, always translated and transformed through negotiations within their given ecosystems.
Jenny Gräf Sheppard has included several silk-screened prints that are graphic energy scores. These are for non-normative conceptualizations of sound for of energy scores that represent a visual approach to
Conceptually, the project to develop a choir of objects that have an ambiguous or even dis/orienting effect: to provoke doubt about what in fact is sounding. The notion of disrupting distinctions between speaker and instrument, reproduction, translation has implications about sound as relational and situated. It gives voice to the spectrum of energies bound up in sonic practice. Within the choir of speaker-instruments, are questions about which voices, mechanisms, systems of power are constrained, masked, dominated and extracted by humans.
Link to exhibition page: https://trafo.art/en/jenny-graf-shepparduwalnianie-glosnikow/
The Pidgin Choir,
Performance/Installation. Performed at RMC in Copenhagen for What Sounds Do: New Directions in an Anthropology of Sound symposium, September 2023. (With performer Dorte Bjerre Jensen)
16 spatially arranged porcelain audio speakers made of porcelain, copper, magnets and and electronics, through which live and pre-recorded sounds are played. Performers and at times audience engage with the speakers manipulating their sound. The vibro-tactile aspect and kinetic movement of the speaker wire and forms reflect an interest in animating the process of transduction of sound energy. Pidgin refers to the various and combined languages these objects speak, while also giving a little nod to the homing pigeon, one of many creatures with magnetoreceptors.
The Body Electromagnetic (2021) and speaker design
My work with speaker design is a means to expose the closed system of interactions, flows, transductions that take place within a conventional speaker object. The sounding of these materialities and relations are what interest me. Opening up the conventional design of the speaker allows for expansion of the sensorial engagement with sound, to feel it more directly in the hands and to manipulate the objects to realise their function as filters, as contaminants, as actors in these soundings. These speaker-instruments are tactile, and form relationships with the bodies that intervene. Their transductions offer noisy, fertile disturbances and uncertainties. In some designs, magnets are mobile, unfixed from the coils, enabling different relationships to sound. At first I worked with copper spirals on transparencies that could be layered to mix the sound physically, and bent to form filters, as seen below in the first performance I did using them.
This led me to design a number of different speakers that could be played as instruments. The first was The Body Electromagnetic created for use by residents in several social institutions in Denmark for people with dementia, blindness and psychological challenges. Inspired by Douglas Kahn’s work within Energies Humanities, I began to consider this area of my work in terms of energies, and the qualities that energy expresses- transformation, translation, flows, fields. Some of these speaker designs allow the human body to enter into the transduction process, and to allow the various materialities to voice themselves.
I incorporated porcelain substrates, which is a sort of contradiction, as porcelain’s is rigidity does not give in to the push and pull of electro-magnetic forces. As a result, movement of the copper itself was given a voice. The copper could sing, click, buzz, flop, whip against the rigidity of porcelain. The emphasis in these designs is a re-thinking of the control and domination over nature, as is present in many of our technological designs for harnessing the wild energies that exist with and around us. For me, such an inquiry is ultimately about how we relate with nature and how much we are willing to live in collaboration with our environments. The intra-actions of electrical and magnetic fields also produce a challenging model to think with.
the above works were funded by the following Danish organisations: Statens Kunstfond, KODA, The Novo Nordisk Mads Øvlisen grant for PhD research and a Ministry of Culture KUV (artistic research) grant, and Make Sound Residency in Malmö, Sweden.