A musical instrument sculpture that facilitates a sonic ritual for up to seven people.


Kyrie, eleison

The Bluescycle is an interactive, musical bicycle that can be played by people of all ages and abilities. The sculpture is outfitted with a range of bike horns and wheels that play a variety of blues riffs and patterns. 

The sculpture is intended to honor the legacy of two prominent Black composers with ties to central Arkansas: William Grant Still and Florence Price. Both composers utilized the blues language in novel ways, in works such as the Afro-American Symphony, the Mississippi River Suite, and the Suite of Dances. The Bluecycle also examines the politics of bicycle transportation, such as its role in the Montgomery Bus Boycott, in Marcel Duchamp’s Readymades, in urban planning, and social activism.

Bluescycle

The Tubascope is an interactive sculpture that works like a telescope for your ears.  Modeled after obsolete acoustic locators of the 1930s, the Tubascope is made from reclaimed and repurposed brass instruments and copper tubing. Rather than produce music, the sculpture invites the viewer to engage in the simple act of focused listening. 



Tubascope

This is a musical composition that is realized by a viewer utilizing a wearable acoustic locator.  Each speaker on the wall plays samples of ASMR (Auto Sensory Meridian Response), an experience characterized by a static-like or tingling sensation on the skin triggered by specific auditory phenomenon.  ASMR is sometimes used to treat anxiety, PTSD, and insomnia.  


ASMR Etude

Self Portrait is a mural that merges graphic notation with the functionality of the theremin. The mural is played by moving one’s hands across the wall to trigger audio samples of tongue clicks, muttering, whispers, and other guttural sounds that are played through speaker drivers that protrude from the mural.


Self Portrait

“Take a walk at night. Walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears.”
— Pauline Oliveros
Human Stylus is a series of wearable sculptures that sonify the body. Drawing influence from early Foley effects, science fantasy, and the Sonic Meditations of Pauline Oliveros, the work invites viewers to wear artificial body appendages, makeshift hand-antennas, and bizarre ear trumpets to engage in alien forms of sonification.

Human Stylus

This work pays homage to disappearing and defunct methods of seafaring communication, such as signal flags, steam-powered foghorns, conch shells, bells operated by horses, cannons, and rifles. Produced from salvaged marching band equipment, the foghorn-like sculptures emit an eleven-track audio soundscape recorded on brass instruments in Parker’s garage. Facing its radio tower counterparts across the lagoon, the sculpture encourages viewer to listen deliberately, not unlike the experience of putting an ear up to a shell to “hear” the sea.



Foghorn Elegy

Ghost Box is a playable sound sculpture modeled after a WWII era short wave radio. When touched, the sculpture plays different looped audio clips of coded transmissions, including Morse Code, spirituals, the Hebrew Shofar, and the Iron Age Celtic carnyx. Embedded into the sound sculpture are a series of musical scores on paper that incorporate maps and icons of the WWII Ghost Army, the functional wires of the attached electronics, and map pins.   A ghost box is a communication tool used by paranormal investigators to speak to the dead. Typically, a ghost box is a modified portable AM/FM radio that continously scans the band. It is believed to create white noise and audio remnants from broadcast stations that entities are able to manipulate to create words and even entire sentences.

Add

Steve Parker