It Felt Like a Kiss
Exploring a novel, tactle sound effect for this Punchdrunk show, Manchester International Festival
In a short collaboration in 2009, I worked with Punchdrunk, the encounter theatre company, to research a novel multimodal effect. This mixed tactile transducers with infrasonics to create an ominous and visceral deep bass sound, something the audience would feel as much as hear.
From my own experiments (including an earlier musical collaboration, 2003), I’d say (tenatively) that infrasound creates a slight sense of ‘electricity’ or ‘aliveness’ in the air – sensations we might associate with feelings of awe or underlying dread. It can subtly alter the mood in a room, without the audience being aware of its presence.
We piloted the effect in The Arcola space and deployed it tenatively in the Punchdrunk show: It Felt Like a Kiss. This promenade piece, was devised by Punchdrunk and documentary maker Adam Curtis (featuring music from Damon Albarn). It Felt Like A Kiss was created in summer 2009 for the Manchester International Festival.
Sub-bass, submarine
I returned to tactile transducers and low-frequencies in 2014 when I reanimated HMS Alliance with a multichannel, generative sound piece. Alliance is the UK’s last-surviving World War II era submarine. If you go into the engine room of the submarine, you’ll experience a powerful sense of the original diesel engines which shake the floorplate of the submarine – just as they would have done when the submarine was underwater.
