Ashley Fure

Ashley Fure

Samuel Barber Rome Prize
September 11, 2017–July 27, 2018
Profession
Assistant Professor, Department of Music, Dartmouth College
Project title
Da Vinci Shaken
Project description

It was Leonardo Da Vinci who found out sound travels in waves. Legend has it he watched a stone fall into a well at the same moment a church bell struck nearby. In a mental leap that later generations might have called cross-modal, Leonardo watched the waves ripple outward from that stone and mapped a theory of how sound pushes air. Taking Leonardo’s cross-modal waves as raw material, in Rome I will develop a large-scale installation in collaboration with the Milan-based Mdi Ensemble. An array of subwoofer speaker cones will spread throughout a space. Lengths of elastic string attached to these palpitating objects will fasten to the room’s infrastructure at diverse angles. While the speakers project infrasound too low for humans to hear, they cause waveforms to ripple through the elastic web, making visible unheard vibrations saturating the room. Both an installation and a custom performance environment, the speakers will transform at designated intervals into kinetic drum kits played by members of Mdi.