Tess Oldfield (b.1992) is a sonic/spatial transformer/synthesizer/composer. She is currently exploring music composition by designing speculative acoustic digital instruments. By creating physical computing systems, she codes kinetic sound sculptures to create immersive three dimensional sound space. The process of transforming found instruments into digital installations allows the work to engage with contemporary new media practices and experimental music composition. She holds a MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in Digital + Media and has exhibited her work throughout New England including Yale University Sculpture Gallery, the New Bedford Art Museum and CyberArtsBoston. She is a Critic/Lecturer at the Rhode Island School of Design in Experimental Foundation Studies and Digital + Media/Computation, Technology & Culture and lives and works in Chicago, IL.
I design speculative acoustic-digital instruments for my experimental music composition and performance practice. My ongoing research examines the mechanics of the body and cultural contexts that singing occupies through site. Using technological tools, I recreate the automated inner workings of the human voice by designing networks of hardware and software to create voice like instruments. The instruments juxtapose the physical body with mechanical mimicry, creating a cacophony of chaotic music, both melodic and industrial, familiar and unfamiliar. The digital extensions I build for found instruments extend my voicing abilities as a performer; transforming tools into elaborate transducers, digital/analog prosthetics.
Pitch Pipe Choir, my ensemble of singers, is a connective architecture between sound and space presenting sites of public intimacy. Boundaries are traversed as this intimate form of public exhibition activates journeys of memory and projections of the imagination. While investigating patterns in the body through my research, I wanted to capture the sensibility of the haptic in my work. Entering the room, the ensemble has a palpable presence and sparks curiosity about the limits of intimacy between the viewer and the machine. The act of listening closely is an experience of intimate transport and a transfer between motion and emotion.
Through transmedial exchanges, it is important that this work will inhabit spaces that are sites of collective ritual, mobility, cultural memory and public exhibition. This mechanical vocal ensemble is a display of various fragments of cultural phenomena that transport and project the viewer into an unknown future.