Liquid Architecture and Audio Foundation present an experimental sound / sonification walk through the Melbourne CBD led by Dunedin artist and musician Charlotte Parallel as part of her first visit to Australia. Charlotte’s work explores the relationship our bodies have to sound waves, transduction, conduction and seismic vibrations, making audible the invisible electromagnetic fields constantly moving through and around us.

ATM

I often initiate projects that involve walking around a place with my mobile sound kit to observe, listen and record sounds. A key part of the sound kit is the DIY light-to-sound transducer — a solar panel wired to an audio jack, which is then plugged into an amplifier. The solar cell can convert a time-varying light signal into a time-varying electrical signal. This small electrical signal is then be fed to an audio signal amplifier and converted into sound. The transformation of energy that enables an interaction between different realities — or both sides of the transducer — is a primary motivation of my practice.

I have chosen to focus on and sonify the ATM (Automatic Teller Machine) as a performative object. The ATM is a familiar day-to-day object placed in malls, shops and urban streets and basically the same in every country with a core purpose; to dispense, transfer and deposit money. On one hand, it is a personal coveted transaction where our bodies shield our bank card with its secret pin number, inserted into the ATM machine to instruct a financial transaction. On the other hand, the transaction is part of a much larger security encrypted communication between financial institutions, the agents of currency distribution.

To listen to an ATM machine by using it as an instrument is to completely reduce it of its original purpose. As the solar panel picks up the flickering glow and translates it to an audio signal heard through the back pack amplifier, the method is still shielded by my body but the sounds are played outwards, to the peoples that pass by or perhaps sharing in the line to use the ATM machine.

I tried this once before in Auckland, Aotearoa as a performance with Duckling Futurian Monster hosted by the Audio Foundation where eventually we where shut down by the police who took our details and asked us to re-perform what we were doing to check we were not scanning the ATM machines for previous users PIN numbers.

Charlotte Parallel, Feb 2020