Hot pink “Post-it” Notes
Andrea Parkins
Hot pink “Post-it” Notes
I work with a “kit” of sound-making objects that I have been collecting for many years. To play the objects, I activate them physically and gesturally, and then process their sounds via my Max-based processing instrument.
I see all of the objects in my collection as indexical to me. While some of them are precious to me because they hold personal historical meaning, others are functional items from daily life that I also feel quite connected to as instruments. For example, I use “Post-it Notes” as sound-producing objects. I extract two or three Post-it tablets from their plastic wrapping, and then instead of peeling off each note piece by piece I grasp the glued edge of a tablet with my fingers, and riffle its pages up against the microphone. Or I pick up two tablets, one in each hand. I quickly interleave their pages, and then “shuffle” them together like a deck of cards, next to the mic. I prefer the hot pink Post-its. It seems to me that hot pink notes are made with slightly thicker paper than the other colors, and so are more responsive sonically when used to create both textural and percussive sounds. The hot-pink pages hitting the microphone or striking against each other can have great punch and impact in the mid-range. When rubbed against the laptop microphone, the pages can sound like brushes circling on a snare drum. (The delicate crispness of the papers’ edges can be heard in the higher frequency range). The Post-its work well as input for my processing, which blurs and morphs the precision of the Post-it sounds with randomized pitch-shifts, glitch, and bursts of feedback.
As a quotidian or functional object, a packet of Post-it Notes has potentiality. Each page in a packet is normally used as a writing surface: for a brief annotation, or a quick message or reminder. It’s also temporary: once the annotation has been placed in its proper location, or the message/reminder has been delivered, the note has no further purpose and is discarded, or sometimes it simply gets lost. But when I use the whole Post-it packet as a singular object to make sound, it has a different potentiality. If it’s a deck of cards, it is an empty deck, with no marks or characters. It’s not a fortune-teller’s deck; there is no message.
When working with an object in this way, its meaning and even its indexical character is displaced. The gesture that activates the object into sound quickly becomes disembodied, and the object as an identifiable thing disappears, perhaps even before the sound lands in acoustic space. In my hands, objects are material and concrete, but their meaning changes: not because they represent something new, but because they become something else.
Andrea Parkins is a sound artist, composer, and electroacoustic improviser, based in Berlin and New York.