Instrumento de Viento
Reminiscing childhood memories of making music by blowing into a bottle turning it into a makeshift flute, “Instrumento de Viento” proposed an instrument in both its scientific and musical sense. Placed atop NOAA’s Fajardo meteorological station on the easternmost coast of Puerto Rico among other wind-measuring instruments, an empty bottle of water was adapted into a tripod and tilted into an angle where the wind made it “sing”. Loosely following the logic of an experiment overlapping sensation and interpretation, this sculptural assemblage adopted and adapted the scientific method to its own poetic ends.
What could be a playful way to translate a mostly haptic or tactile phenomenon like the wind and make it accessible to other senses? How to make a shift in perception from touch into sound? After defining a question based on childhood memories and observations, a preliminary hypothesis appeared: we predicted the instrument would perceive and make sensible an invisible phenomenon by means of vibration –the missing link between touch and sound.
Our initial hypothesis was followed by an experiment, a procedure to gather sensible data aided by specific instrumentation isolating three specific elements: tripod, bottle, and wind. External factors like variant wind patterns and external aural elements were also considered.
Aiming to translate sensible data mediated by the ever-questionable tool of human senses, during our first round of experiments sound could not be perceived first hand. Practices and instruments can transform first-hand perception because they refine the way in which perception takes place in the first place. On a second round of experiments, considering the low wind speeds in the afternoon of Sunday October 20th 2024, a fourth element was implemented, namely a Lavalier microphone provided by Joel Rodríguez and operated by Danny Rivera-Cruz to amplify while isolating the bottle sound from outside noise.
Organizing the collected sound data recorded on site, the archived recording evidenced the amplified sound of our instrument. Hypothesis confirmed: our rudimentary instrument proved to be successful sonifying invisible phenomena like the wind in an exercise as scientific as it is poetic. This report is written as a means to share our findings and results. Our intention is to amplify a shared tendency towards curiosity and the “sense of wonder” that moves both artistic and scientific fields. To put it in the terms of late scientist/poet Rebecca Elson: a responsibility to awe.
Dedicated to Salvador A. Martínez and Izam G. Zawahra