Desert Rain

We interrupt the crits photos to bring you a project from the Technical Direction III class.

A few years ago I was reading this book: The Year's Best Science Fiction: Ninth Annual Collection. There's a story in it called Desert Rain which particularly caught my attention. The top of this story involves an artist constructing a kinetic sculpture meant to reproduce the sound of a rainstorm:

Teresa looked up at the framework of welded steel tubing. It stood nine feet tall and just over six feet on a side. Within the framework, steel tracks snaked above and below one another in seemingly random patterns, forming a gleaming tangle. At regular intervals along the tracks, lines of one inch ball bearings waited to be released. Teresa pulled the string that dangled from the chute at the top of the sculpture, and closed her eyes to listen.

With the faint whisper of metal scraping against metal, a gate opened and freed the first ball, which rattled along the grooved surface of the track. As the ball rounded the first curve, it struck a trip wire and released two more balls. Each of these in turn freed more balls, until dozens were rolling down the tracks with a sound like faraway thunder.

The music started slowly, building as the balls rumbled down the tracks. The first ball struck a series of tuning forks, and three high notes rang out. Another ball rattled across a section of metal reeds, then clattered through a maze of gates. Every ball followed a different path: ringing bells, striking chimes and bouncing off tuning forks.

When the first ball reached the gathering basket, the sound began to lessen. As others followed the first, the sound faded entirely.

With her eyes still shut, Teresa shook her head. The music was not right; it was not even close. She wasn't sure anymore exactly how the composition should sound, but she knew this was not it. The piece sounded too mechanical, too predictable. In her proposal, she had promised the Santa Fe Arts Commission a sculpture that conveyed the essence of water, the rush and flow of it - a waterless fountain for a desert town. She wanted music that would remind people of rain drumming on a tin roof or the roar of a breaking wave. Instead, she had the hum of trucks on the freeway.

Every now and then when I read something or see something I just hear in my head "Well, you have to DO that!" This was one of those times, and so this passage became a project for my old Tech Design I class.

The first class to make the undertaking underachieved impressively. They managed to get some sounds together - I mean find some things that made sounds that they might be able to use, but that was all. The results were so unfortunate that the assignment went into the "perhaps not a great idea" folder never to be heard from again.

This year with about a month left in the semester I gave the Technical Direction III class their choice of assignment for their last project. I gave them every project I had ever given at that level that they already hadn't had to choose from My original thought was that this would be the inaugural time through the "Rube's Revenge" project, but for some reason they didn't bite. They could have picked the Cher Cages, the 1776 Shutters, the Trap Door Hanging, I even threw in the DNC Railings among others; but the one they chose was the Mechanical Rainstorm.

The group this year managed to finish although the sound portion got a lot more emphasis from them than the visual portion:


They went to great lengths to score the soundscape and then work out the math and the mechanics to make it go:


The project makes you research the actual sound, come up with "instrumentation" to reproduce the sound, compose a "score," come up with the physicality to mechanically sequence the score, and then fabricate the whole thing such that it works. It's no small task. This group did a fine job.

I have a video, with decent audio, so you can get the idea but really it doesn't do it justice. The ambient noise is much more present on the film and some of the very high end crunchiness is lost - plus there isn't much to look at. But some evidence is better than no evidence:



Overall a tremendous effort. Maybe if I do it again I will ask them to think more about the visual element of the thing, but maybe not. In any case "well done" all around.