Piano Drop

by Raydale Dower

Tramway - Glasgow - 2011

In 1918 the Dada artist Tristian Tzara declared “Musicians destroy your instruments…”

In 2010, I worked with the artist Raydale Dower, who was at the time completing a Masters degree at the Glasgow School of Art, and working in the Arup / GSA SoundLab. We had discussed 3D ambisonic installations together and following a Creative Scotland, Vital Spark award Raydale proposed the idea for the Piano Drop installation with Arup providing professional partnership for the project.

Raydale’s concept was to drop a piano from the ceiling of the Tramway Theatre space, Glasgow and to film the event at high speed / slow motion with a sound recording for ambisonic playback. The final installation consisted of a looped 22 minute video and sound recording, re-presented in the Tramway T1 Theatre space.

Sound was projected through a large-scale ambisonic 3D sound installation utilising Alcons ribbon speakers. The speakers required a very low frequency response - the high speed digital photography had been shot at 1000fps affording very detailed slow motion playback at up to 40 x slower than the actual event with the audio recording significantly time stretched to match the durations of the edits, which by consequence, implyed lowering the audio frequency content, as slowing the sound results in a lowering the frequency content.

Whilst employed at Arup, I worked closely with Raydale on all technical aspects of Piano Drop including the B-Format sound capture, the Max-MSP patch for 3D audio handling and calibration of the speaker array for the ambisonic sound installation.