Ian Baxter
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Sound Artist

Installations - Twelve Ttwweellvvee Tttwwweeelllvvvweee

This installation was part of a broader exhibition at Bank Street using the date 12/12/12 as its inspiration. Various works were displayed using the number 12 for their inspiration.

I hit upon the idea of using voices saying the phrase twelve, twelve, twelve and similar to my work Takes...Down...Will...My...Heart, exploiting the natural differences between people's voices to produce chance chords and harmonies. I set about collecting voices (with great number coming from the Juxtavoices choir) in several languages.

To create a varied soundscape the articulated phrase "twelve twelve twelve" was subject to time stretching (using phase vocoding, the technique behind several works using long stretches of time). These time stretches also revolved round the number twelve, the longest being twelve hours. Others were twelve minutes, seconds based on the twelve times table (so 12, 24, 36 up to 144), 1 to 12 seconds (at which point 1 second strictly becomes a time compression rather than a stretch) and then 1 second divided into twelfths (so 1/12 of a second, 2/12 etc).

This palette of sounds produces a mixture of lengthy drones where individual phonics become long drawn out tones and shorter events where the phrase "12 12 12" can be heard albeit transformed.