Richard Chartier - Transparency (Performance) (CD)

This is a recording of a performance from October 2010 in the ring Auditorium at Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington DC. The performance is a culmination of recordings from a research fellowship which explored the National Museum of American History's collection of 19th century acoustic apparatus. One piece from the collection that was recorded was the Grand Tonometer (c.1870 -1875). This sounds like quite a piece of kit - 692 tuning forks with a vast frequency range. So listening to the disc you basically get some wild frequencies and pitches that will have dogs going crazy. Unfortunately right now I'm listening on headphones which really is not the best way I suspect to consume the audio and probably not healthy for my ears. It reminds me of being a kid at primary school where a big van would come along and kids would go in there to have their hearing tested. They used to put headphones on you and then there would be silence, then all of a sudden a weird frequency would come along and when you heard it you needed to hit a block of wood with another block of wood. Happy days.