Environmental Studies by SIX MICROPHONES

Six Microphones is a site-determined composition of audio feedback by designer and composer Robert Gerard Pietrusko, which explores the mutually constitutive relationships among sound, space, and audience. 

'Environmental Studies' is an iteration of the piece created specifically for the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts (CCVA) in Cambridge, MA—the only building in North America designed by famed architect Le Corbusier. Installed at the CCVA during the spring of 2015, the piece unfolded over the course of a month. This recording is an excerpt from that longer performance, captured on the evening of 9 April 2015.

Installed, Six Microphones illustrates the simplest and most legible diagram of feedback—a microphone pointed at a loudspeaker. The piece transforms the gallery from a space in which sound simply propagates, to the medium required to bring sound into being.

Six Microphones is site-determined: no sound is generated, it is only amplified. All tones and modulations produced during a performance emerge from the continual interaction between the system and the space itself. This is dependent on three elements: (1) the composition as it unfolds in time, implemented as a changing combination of microphone amplitudes, (2) the geometry and materiality of the space in which the system is sited, and (3) the presence of listeners within the space. Though the structure of the composition remains the same from one performance to the next, the acoustic result is contingent on the complex interaction of these three elements and cannot be anticipated beforehand. As such, there is no “intrinsic” or “original” version of the piece that exists independent from its spatial context.

Pietrusko's previous LINE edition, the self-titled work Six Microphones (LINE_105: https://www.lineimprint.com/editions/sound/line-105 ), was released in 2019, coinciding with a beautiful 2LP vinyl edition published on Counter Audition, US. ( https://www.counter-audition.org/000ca-six-microphones)

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Robert Gerard Pietrusko is a designer and composer living in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His work is part of the permanent collection of the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain in Paris and has been exhibited in more than 15 countries at venues such as MoMA, Centre Pompidou, Akademie der Künste, and the Venice Architecture Biennale. Residencies include ZKM (2011), EMPAC (2011), MacDowell (2019), and the Rome Prize for Landscape Architecture (2021).

Richard Chartier's LINE publishes editions documenting compositional & installation works by international sound artists & composers exploring the aesthetics of minimalism.

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