The following videos are a documentation of a installation I created to accompany an exhibition by Eva Mileusnic called ‘Critical Mass’. The work was shown in January 2019 and was featured in the national press.

Corridor8 review here

Corridor8 review here

The music boxes play melodies from punched card where each hole on the card represents a note. The process of punching out the notes is pretty time consuming and it is really easy to make a mistake. The only option in this case is to start again!

I sourced eight of these from an online distributer and coupled each on with a small electric motor so the machine could be self-powered (normally a small crank is turned to operate the device). It was not easy to find a motor that was able to drive the mechanism whilst also being quiet enough to allow the delicate sounds from the music boxes to be audible. However, from some careful eBay searching I found a low-voltage motor (originally designed to drive the paper roll in electronic tills) which was suitably quiet. I also wanted each machine to be activated when visitors moved around Eva’s work. I wanted the music to be quiet and reminiscent of childhood at first, but to build up as the visitors move around the site. I used some small Passive Infrared sensors to switch each music box on for a set amount of time before switching itself off.

The video in the link below was made to illustrate how movement is used to trigger each box (although Eva’s work was not present during this demonstation).

This first video is 360˚ and the audio was rendered from 2nd Order Ambisonics to binaural. It is best experienced with headphones

This video was recorded from the perspective of the visitor and the audio was captured using two DPA 4060 microphones placed in my ears. It is essential to listen on headphones!