“USING A PAIR OF PLIERS, I randomly bent back different tines
on each of the music boxes,” says Ethan Rose, “effectively removing
notes from the song that was originally intended.” In this way, Rose
created the sonic reductions desired for his sound installation
Movements. Rose originally created the piece for Seattle’s
Ambach & Rice gallery in December of 2008, where he set 125 of his
hacked music boxes on timers and arranged them throughout the room.
“The boxes are spread evenly throughout the space to create an
immersive experience,” Rose explains. “The reflective surfaces of the
gallery walls [make] the sounds of the music boxes shift and move
through the room.” The music boxes, like little comets with wires for
tails, are triggered at different intervals and locations, sounding
something like an inquisitive-furry-woodland-creature theme song meets
Hollywood-sunset soundtrack; it’s a warm, introspective sound, similar
to wind chimes, with various melodies suggested and abandoned at
random.
The visual presentation of Rose’s music boxes—wire sunbursts
sprawling down white walls—is designed first for sonic function,
to evenly disperse the sources of song. Rose says that the physical
arrangement of Movements is also constrained by “groups of boxes
on timer switches,” while the wires are “laid out in random branching
configurations to reflect [the] balance of chance and control.”
For Rose, deprogramming the automated instrument is an artistic
compass. After moving to Portland in 1996 and spending more than a
decade making music and art, Rose’s creative undertakings became
focused on removing his own artistic preferences from the songs he
creates. In a piece titled Player Piano, Rose augmented the
paper roll on a player piano and processed the resulting song through a
loop/delay/reverb-ish effects combo—forcing the composition to
endlessly layer and echo over itself.
“Working with automated instruments has strongly informed my
artistic practice,” says Rose. “My work describes an interaction
between myself and the material at hand.” When Rose blindly deprograms
his music boxes, he renders himself a listener—reducing his sense
of compositional authorship, while maintaining his role as creator.