Subwhistle — Brian Jacobs
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Subwhistle — Brian Jacobs
Amazing Moments in Timbre | Timbre and Orchestration Writings
by Oliver Kwapis
Published: Feb. 3rd, 2022 | How to cite
Begin the video and quickly close your eyes.
Where are you? What do you hear?
I am standing on a rainforest floor. Surrounding me, but in my aural periphery, a million insects murmur, forming a sonic haze as impenetrable as the thick vegetation. My focus is drawn towards the canopy, where a few birds converse, hidden from view.
Their calls are hollow, round, and wooden: drumsticks on temple blocks. They are pitched, but noisy, airy, and imprecisely tuned. I notice that the rhythms of their calls are metronomically regular—inhumanly regular—but I don’t know enough about birds (maybe a bird could produce those rhythms), and so I don’t think much of it.
After listening for twelve seconds, I hear a new bird join the colloquium—a strange bird, a printer bird (perhaps, the red-feathered-HP-DeskJet-2755!). It has a similar temple-block call, but within the hollow of its sound is a mechanical whirring, as if the bird has a printer in its body, dragging page-after-page from the paper tray in its stomach, through the ink rollers in its throat, and finally out of its mouth. This uncanny mix of timbres is harder to ignore than the precise rhythms. Something begins to tug at the fabric of my fantasy (but again, I’m no avian expert).
At thirty-four seconds, however, an even more bizarre bird begins to crow. This bird’s call is different. It comprises definite (or more-definite) pitches, and its timbre is closer to the ratatat of a machine gun than the dumdumdum of a temple-block. Here, my fantasy fully breaks down. This “bird” sounds too artificial, too mechanical. I have to know exactly what I’m hearing and so I open my eyes and watch the rest of the video of Bryan Jacobs’ sound installation, Subwhistle.
Subwhistle (2015) is a simply constructed piece. In lieu of a program note, Jacobs provides a brief technical description. “Subwhistle,” he writes, “uses low frequency sound to play slide whistles. Each of the 4 subwoofers is connected to a slide whistle, forcing air into the mouthpiece. The air oscillates at the frequency of the speaker, usually between 10 and 30 Hz. All the sound we hear in this video is generated acoustically from the slide whistles. The low rumblings of the subwoofers can occasionally be heard” (Jacobs 2015). One of the thrills of listening to Subwhistle comes from hearing the timbral panoply Jacobs elicits from these four original instruments by manipulating just one musical parameter: the inaudible frequencies of the four subwoofers. As I wrote above, I perceive a variety of often contradictory timbres: some hollow, some full, some birdlike, some mechanical, some wooden, airy, whirring, limp, rigid, acoustic-sounding, and digital-sounding.
Yet, the kaleidoscopic juxtaposition of these timbres also poses a challenge for listeners. It disrupts the listener’s ability to, as Cornelia Fales (2002, 61) notes, “maintain an identity relationship between acoustic source and perceived source”. In other words, the timbral juxtaposition disrupts the listener’s ability to identify what they are hearing. The moment I feel confident that I’m listening to birds, I hear a new timbre that transforms my perception of the birds into birdlike automatons, and then into alarm clocks, and then into something else entirely. I relish music that continuously forces me to reevaluate what I’m hearing. It is as if I am playing chess with Subwhistle. I move my pawn to G5 (I assign a source to a sound) and then Subwhistle captures my pawn with its knight (it complicates my identification), and so the game goes on.
Of course, I know that I am not actually hearing birds or printers or automatons: they are all fantasies—imaginative metaphors for the piece’s actual instruments and acoustic events. Yet, my imaginings do reflect my real attempts to distinguish between sounds I believe are acoustic versus electronic, organic versus mechanical.
This is a doubly difficult goal. Subwhistle is a piece in which the activation of an acoustic event (air moving through the slide whistles) is triggered by an electromechanical process (the movement of a subwoofer playing a sub-audio frequency). Source identification, then, is a trick question. At any given point in the piece, if I perceive a sound as acoustic or electronic (organic or mechanical), I am both correct and incorrect. Subwhistle is at once both solely acoustic, solely electronic, and electro-acoustic.
The piece presents a heady paradox, but, after the video has finished, what I remember most is that, for a while, Subwhistle made me hear birds.
Works Cited:
Fales, Cornelia. 2002. “The Paradox of Timbre.” Ethnomusicology 46 (1): 56-95. https://doi.org/10.2307/852808.
Jacobs, Bryan. 2015. "Subwhistle by Bryan Jacobs." YouTube. Video, 3:11. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7wKJu_4geo.
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