Sonic Bed Laboratory

Sonic Bed is a purpose built portable venue which plays music that moves for the prone bodies of an audience, who can come and lie in the bed alone or together.

Sonic Bed Laboratory is a sonic and social experiment exploring our perception of sound. It presents an oversized king-size bed which looks much like a large wooden tank with steps to climb up to get in it. Visitors then are invited to remove their shoes and come lie on and enjoy specially constructed sound pieces vibrating through and moving up and down and around their bodies. Subtle, dynamic, at times beyond hearing, Sonic Bed plays music to feel rather than just listen to.

Sonic Bed Laboratory can also offer the opportunity for visitors to book one to one tuning sessions, where the artists will come and make music for the visitors own requirements.

Media: 4 x wooden side panels.

1 x flame retardant foam mattress.

Cushions and cover.

Multi channel sound system

220V mains electricity.

Sonic Bed and the Laboratory is a unique art work conceived and directed by Kaffe Matthews. Any person wishing to use or copy this work please contact Annette Works. Thankyou.

BACKGROUND.

Extracts from for Her Noise Exhibition catalogue. September 2005.

1. What was the original motivation behind sonic bed?

I’ve long been interested in the physical experience of music and have made two sonic armchairs which combine the vibrational sensations of music perception with aural to make new compositions. These chairs, with speakers immersed under their upholstery, create situations that transform the listening experience for the sitter, turning ‘weird’ or ‘boring’ music into something meaningful. People will queue for hours, have a completely different experience, love it and talk of the musical as well as physical and psychological experiences they have had afterwards.

The body of my work in the last 10 years has been improvised site specific performance work through quadraphonic systems, which play with an open bag of unknown ingredients that have to be dealt with moment by moment at each event. Sonic furniture provides quite the opposite: a purposefully constructed, intimately known, containable, portable venue, for which a specific piece is carefully made and which audience can experience one by one or alone, and directly through their bodies, no eyes.

Specific frequencies can be mapped to specific areas, architectural scores can be made.

Making a sonic bed will allow a development of this work in many directions.

Initially, this will be the first opportunity to work with the visitor lying down, secondly that a bed is a potentially social space. Third, that the space under an oversized kingsize will provide much larger spaces for speakers, enabling the construction of fully operational sub-woofa cabinets so allowing play with types and levels of vibration not yet managed through the chairs.

Sonic furniture background.

Since my first sonic arcmchair (Arts Council funded interactive installation PlacemadeMobile, collaboration with Mandy McIntosh 1997), I have since made 2 works, which have been installed in London, Liverpool, York, Hamburg and Glasgow. The most recent outing to Hamburg delighted 400, 000 visiting bottoms.

Sonic Armchair no1

A 1950's armchair with 8 speakers installed inside , and a remote control for each sitter to play a specially made work by Kaffe. The piece for this show was titled "....for Doris Whincopp": deep-layered and circular, which vibrated through and around the sitter massaging in shifting layers and patterns. A penetrating bass underneath, with two patterns gliding left to right at different speeds across the shoulders and the lower back and kidneys, the high frequencies buzzing circular around the ears. Visitors queued on the stairs all day to have a ride.

"This magical armchair, successfully perverts an every day object and action into an extraordinary journey.Every home should have one. "

The Glasgow Herald. July 1997

In 1999, I was commissioned by the Millenium exhibition “Don’t Worry” at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, to make chair no.2, aka Red Chair. A luxurious and oversized development of the first, for which I made the work de cardiac bass(2000), Take a Ride(2000)Beckett Time Festival, and Drop Time(2002),Reading City Stages commission.

PLEASE SEE http://www.annetteworks.com for more information on the sonic armchairs made, in the artist, works made, solo section.

2. Through the process of developing the piece you have moved away from wanting to work with the brain’s activity as source to wanting to work with the whole of the human body, architectural maps as you call them. Why is this and in fact what do you mean by this?

Well I think almost 2 years has gone by since we first talked of this commission and so ideas and approaches of course have been moving on. A big part of that has been my developing a conceptual and physical understanding of energy and the continuous vibration of matter, as well as developing a practise in working with many sound outputs, ie. many speakers. This practice in itself means being able to build and work architecturally with sound. Construct, create and move sound through different dimensions, rather than just within the restriction of stereo. Work with real shapes that move with time.

Bed contains a 12 channel sound system so allowing the creation of this sculptural music, the score of which will be the map of the human body as a whole; its shape, its depths, its varieties and how it lies. And I will be using combinations of frequencies that I am being given from a bio-resonance practitioner, that are known to have particular effects in certain combinations and so sculpt spaces to lie in using them. The development of this understanding is an ongoing part of my practice that I will be developing in 2006 as well as in potential one to one sessions with visitors in an installation situation.

I should add that I am not interested to explore this field to make ‘healing’ music or therapeutic furniture. Simply to explore the possibility of using the body map and its energy as source for music making. This is much more what I was looking for than brain activity as data, which now seems superficial in comparison. The vibrating body as a whole much more relevant.

3. Your ‘native’ context is that of live performance and improvised live music in which much is left to chance. You have yourself described the experience as ‘One minute you’re walking along and everything is breezy and beautiful and the next minute it’s a bloody disaster.’ The gallery environment is more controlled, and less is open to chance. What is the attraction of moving into this realm?

The gallery context provides a compositional environment and one that is not structured around performance , so normal performic restrictions regarding time and audience disappear. This is a great situation to present other ideas then, present them as you intend, rather than create something out of that situation, which is what the live work does. As well as what is said above in no.2, sonic furniture also specifically allows me to work on a central aspect to the performic work ,which is accessing the physicality of sound and directly composing with it. The intimate nature of the gallery space is a good opportunity too, as visitors can have quiet experiences alone, and not be bombarded by the demands of a performance/happening. So at the end of the day its enabling a greater awareness of the audio which is also a central pin underlying what I have been doing all these years.

Having said this about my compositional intentions and being able to work with precision, running a laboratory allows me to get direct input from visitors/audience, one to one and be able to essentially work on the composition together.

KM September 1st 2005. (Sonic Bed was commissioned by Electra for the Her Noise Exhibition, London 2005 and funded by Women in Music.)