Writings

For the Sixth Annual Activating The Medium festival in 2003, 23five arranged a series of brief interviews between many of the participants at the festival. This conversation with Michael Gendreau was conducted by Randy Yau.

Randy Yau: You are a musician. By day, you are an acoustician. Does the cross-section of these two professions influence how you approach works of either profession? How do you perceive music as an acoustician and how do you perceive acoustics as a musician?

Michael Gendreau: Actually, day and night are pretty mixed up for me. I carry out my musical and acoustical work in many different time zones, and it ends up that he best time for work in acoustics is often late at night, when most people are asleep and not driving their cars.

Philosophically, I separate the two disciplines absolutely. In reality, I indulge in a collaboration of the different mind sets, within limits. It is possible to have a real separation between the relatively subjective realm of aesthetics and the more objective world of science and analysis, and I think it is necessary to be able to work at the extremes of these limits at will. That said, I get the greatest pleasure, it might be said to be an aesthetic pleasure, in developing a new and logically documentable path to the solution of a particular problem in acoustics or vibration. Another aspect of this collaboration is that the ear is one of the most useful instruments an acoustician has; in certain aspects its power of resolution is greater than any electronic instrument, so that there is no doubt that musical ability is a benefit in acoustical analysis. You might be surprised how many acousticians have musical abilities, and we use these to, say, recall the pitch or the harmonic content of a particular noise. To put it in a base way, as an adjunct to scientific analytical skills, ability in the humanities has long been thought, in general, to be a benefit in scientific analysis. Strangely, I have found the opposite to be less useful. Science (acoustics) may provide us with some interesting tools, but musical work that primarily represents a particular tool, be it physical or conceptual, is ultimately uninteresting to me. If nothing else, the relevance of such music is highly time-limited, in accordance with the development of material or conceptual technology. The problem with reliance on technology is that music lacks the universal logical language of science and develops individually (i.e., very slowly) instead of collectively. Rather, I think it is better to perceive, develop, and adapt music as one does daily life. In my case, it involves some acoustics, as well as a lot of other things.

In your work, you use sophisticated engineering devices to activate a dimension of music that seems deeply inherent within the materiality of objects--transforming microscopic events into macroscopic landscapes. Can you briefly describe your process and perhaps your inspiration to transpose scientific process into that of aesthetic?

My particular work in vibration and noise happens to focus on very low vibration and noise environments designed for work at very small dimensions (nano-scale and smaller). The engineering devices you mention are the very sensitive accelerometers and microphones necessary to carry out this analytical work, as well as other devices such as shakers used to activate structures under investigation. My work in this realm is necessarily very time-consuming. The practicality, or inspiration as you call it, is that this is the world I work in, and in which am also willing to find useful material for musical work. Science is all about discovering the inherent qualities of objects and spaces, and this reality can be very strange. It seems to be my experience that the phenomena that make up the most important part of music can be found and adapted from any discipline. What makes it music is more a function of the dynamic qualities and energy (or, cynically, positioning) with which one engages with the phenomena. Looking back over my own history in music, which is twice as long as my 15-year engagement with physics, it pleases me to see common aesthetic patterns in spite of radically varying source material. That said, the microscopic is particularly fruitful, interesting, and most importantly, without limits.