Touch Noise: Final Artwork & Concept Statement
In Pia van Gelder’s Noble Wave, a team of artists record the sounds of Mount Feathertop in Victoria, Australia. The organic sounds are accompanied by vision of the artists themselves, sitting peacefully with their instruments. Inspired by this, I looked into sonic art, starting out with a simple microphone plugged into a computer, recording the sounds of plastic, aluminium and rubber. Continuing on from my chosen weekly theme (experimentation), eventually I read ‘Handmade Electronic Music’ by Nicolas Collins, an accomplished sound artist himself.
Using the book as a guide, I set out to create my very own, homemade contact microphone. I used a singular piezo element, along with an old XLR audio cable and a 6.5mm jack plug to make the mic. I purchased soldering equipment, electrical tape and industrial-grade rubberised plastic and followed the series of experiments. I learnt so much about cable anatomy, soldering technique, the circuitry of microphones and electrical safety (breathing solder fumes is actually bad for you…).
The result was a fully functional piezo microphone: I couldn't believe I succeeded in creating it myself. It was also waterproof, thanks to the rubberised coating. What I learnt about these mics is that they are not a regular microphone – they only pick up sounds through contact and vibrations, not acoustically. Armed with this amazing tool to see the world in a whole new way, I set out to capture the unheard frequencies in our world.
I wanted to make an atmospheric, ambient and haunting soundscape, motivated by Noble Wave. I touched, pushed, skidded, stuck, bent, pressed, twisted and rotated the microphone against everyday materials and items, like water, plastic, clocks and nature. Using Audacity and Audition, I layered the ten multi-tracks and applied reverb, delay, phasing, echo, equalisation, pitch shift, normalisation and transitions to various snippets of the audio. Using a DSLR, I filmed the process and fused together the audio and video in Premiere Pro. The result is Touch Noise.
















