Jonathan Cant – Symphony for Straatmeubilair

The only moment we ever hear talks about straatmeubilair (street furniture), is when they get destroyed in a protest action. Within the context of this residency, I want to research constructive and disruptive protest amplification. I am interested in both the power of noise as a protest mechanism and the power of speech as a way of bringing people together. For this, I want to use exciters, a cheap DIY technology. Exciters take away the cabinet and woofer of a speaker, instead replacing the vibrating object by whatever you place them on. This can be styrofoam or office ceiling tiles, but also a metal plate or even a bus stop. The speaker platform will fulfill multiple goals: it must be cheap, low cost, open-source and one should be able to hide it. Within this residency, I’d like to research what kind of surfaces one could use and if one could build a wireless system that is able to fulfill the function of a speaker set for larger gatherings, where different speakers work together playing the same sound from different objects, clearly translating a speech for example. The end goal of the research project would thus be two-fold: to have an open-source speaker platform activists can solder together using online plans and cheap parts, and to have a musical piece that uses this system artistically.

This research project continues upon a project by Brussels’ based artist Isaac Moss. We would collaborate for the first part of the residency, as the technological aspect would be strongly based upon Isaac’s earlier findings. Within the spirit of open-source, it seems no more than logical to also develop the open-source platform together, to share the development with others. Furthermore, I’d like to continue on Isaac’s research by researching some added functionality for the portable exciters: a microphone to build a feedback system that finds the resonant frequency of the object the exciter is placed upon and some simple DSP to make the sound more clear. In the second part of the residency, I’d work on the musical part, using the developed technology to construct a symphony of vibrating everyday straatmeubilair, navigating through their resonant frequencies.