Textile Sounds

Textile Sounds is a project aimed at getting various sounds out of different fabrics, it’s an art piece that combines two of my greatest passions in life, music and textile art. therefore its no surprise that I wanted to bring these two together.

The problem I faced was how to create these sounds. During one of my earlier projects  my sleeve accidentally got caught in the mouth of a vacuumcleaner, it produced a very interesting trumpet like sound. That was my “eureka” moment, where i knew that I wanted to investigate this phenomena further.
Once I knew that suction could produce sounds out of cloth, I was curious if various pieces of textile material would produce  distinct timbres.
 I knew beforehand  that the recordings would have interference from the sound of the vacuumcleaner itself. I played with the idea of putting the vacuum cleaner in a box, but finally decided against that, as i found a vacuumcleaner with a long hose, therefore minimalizing the sound of the vacuum engine. What factors where in play here? Was the thickness of a piece of fabric a major contributor, or would the material itself play more of a role?
Because I wanted a clean recording I opted to research the first two variables, as the power of suction would only diminish the generation of sound. Once I had the variables I saw the possibility of composing a piece of music with this“instrument”.
I re-recorded the sounds with the techniques ive learned, and got good source material, then I proceded to cut and paste the various samples together to form a microtonal composition where  let the textile voices speak for themselves. I found the visual representation of my composition visually pleasing and worked out a way to translate that back into two textile objects. As shown here above a way of wearing the song as a necklace, or presented as Music object in an abstract way.