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Marco Cecotto

Making The Ground Wail: Q&A With Sound Artist Marco Cecotto

Could the next big heavy metal group have soil for a bandmate?

Depending on its physical and chemical properties, soil possesses electrical conductivity. For example, if a batch contains more clay than it does sand, its conductivity is about ten times greater than a sandy heap. Through its electrical charge, farmers can map out the variability of a plot of soil too. Sound artist Marco Cecotto, however, would rather make it scream.

His interactive sound installation of the same name, SOIL, turns the skin of the earth into a screeching instrument. As users fiddle with two metal bars that resemble torture instruments, the installation’s oscillation frequency changes, creating subversive sounds that are all too iconic of Cecotto’s work.

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The installation…

…features four clay pots that are each equipped with their own pair of bars for the tinkering. As you can see, it’s all part of an elaborate handmade circuitry…

…that reaches our ears as expected: through speakers.

The end result goes something like this:

SOIL from Marco Cecotto.

Cecotto isn’t the first - or the second - artist to give Mother Nature her own voice, but SOIL does illustrate the artist’s penchant for converting unexpected objects into instruments. He calls them ‘non-given’ instruments. The Creators Project talks to him below. TCP: Your past projects have seen you giving "voice" to objects that tend to be thought of as voiceless--non-given instruments you call them. But where did the idea to use soil as a sound-maker come from?

Marco: It all started because of Terramater, a collective exhibition curated by the Rizoo Group. The Rizoo Group invited me to participate in the Terramater project. I really wanted my participation to express something really specific and meaningful for the context and the concept of the event. So, since the very beginning, the main idea [behind] my Terramater installation was soil--what else? The problem was: how can I use it? I needed to find a way both to generate sound from soil and to make visitors conscious about this process. I considered several different strategies, but, at the end, I came to decide that simpler [is] better.

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I went back to my past experiments in DIY electronic devices construction, and I remembered how thrilling [it] was to use everyday objects as variable resistance in electronic circuits (making use of their electrical resistivity and conductivity). You can really feel yourself interact with sound through a physical contact with an object. I believe that you can think of SOIL as a non-given instrument, a DIY hybrid oscillator that combines soil with electronic circuits. And I do enjoy so much how it sounds—so rough, so wild!

INTERACTIVE SURFACE [video demo] from Marco Cecotto.

Do you consider yourself a ‘non-given’ musician then?

No, I'm an ex-musician! When I was seventeen I used to play bass in a noise/metal/hardcore band, but I gave up [on] music almost 10 years ago. I loved the noise that we did at that time, but I was seeking…something different. I was looking for new aesthetic and technical tools for structuring my sound projects within space and time; moreover, I was looking for new instruments, more flexible and open. Maybe today I could consider myself a composer, but not a traditional one: I don’t compose a fixed set of tones or sounds, I try to combine technology, space and social behavior in order to generate a flow of sound events.

Plan on using any other earth-based conduits in the future?

Who knows? I already used sound and soil for another related project, the Terramater teaser, realized with Samuele Grando. We buried some speakers in a box filled [with] soil. Then we had the soil shaken by the sound, by the mere movement of the speakers’ membrane.

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TERRAMATER from Mano.

Currently, I'm working [on] other projects, more related to generative software and sound libraries, therefore a rather different field.

From Trashing Sounds to Crossing Waves, you seem to really enjoy toying with people's expectations of the acoustic world around them. Why?

Given a certain situation, my basic strategy is to start a project from what is already present and available. I love the process of interfering with "the," given that happened to be my starting point, trying to use the elements I have in an unconventional way. I'm really interested in this kind of feedback process because, in my mind, it produces a temporary space between us and our habits and expectations.

Beside its practical utility or theoretical meaning, such a suspension provides us with new ears, enriching our listening experience and sound imagination.

CROSSING WAVES from Marco Cecotto.

For CROSSING WAVES, Cecotto made a public square in Venice into a sound box that captured the acoustic modulations created by foot traffic.

In works like CROSSING WAVES or TRASHING SOUNDS, the given situation I had to deal with was a public space. It is a context that I l love because public spaces are really complex environments. A public space is a true contemporary orchestra.

In TRASHING SOUNDS,_ Cecotto set up trash bins that play random algorithms of “sound waste” (computer errors, glitches) files when opened. Sorry kid._

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Basically, you come to have a lot of different actions and different paths with their specific sound outcome. My effort is to change people's actions and paths - and consequently the specific sound outcome of a public space--by using the sound. Actually, it is the sound that changes, temporarily, people's expectations.

Of all your projects, which one would you say challenged participants' concepts of sound and noise the most?

In my opinion the border between sound and noise is a line drawn by our attention and by our expectations, it is something related to our ability to listen. If we don't understand a sound event, if it doesn't have a meaning for us, or if we simply reject a sound event because it annoys us, then it is a noise.

Personally, I think the installation INNER VOICES really challenges boundaries between sound and noise among the participants because it transforms everyday devices [into] living things.

INNER VOICES - a conversation from Marco Cecotto.

They “[interact] with each other through sound as if they were talking, listening to the other devices, and to the surrounding environment, which obviously features human beings, too. It sounds like a conversation because you perceive a structure emerging from this chaotic, alien and artificial soundscape. But actually you are listening to Larsen tones, a classic and annoying noise… you happen to hear…in everyday life!