KYTN (Kill Your Timid Notion) is a festival of sound and image, exploring as many different ways in which artists, filmmakers and musicians can investigate the border between what you hear and what you see. Staged last month at the Dundee Contemporary Arts in Scotland, beyond6281 was an electro-acoustic project by a group of artists from Montreal called Artificiel, exploring the light bulb as sound source.
By feeding processed audio signals through powerful Kind Audio amplifiers, they directly excited the filaments in very large, 1000W, light bulbs, causing them to vibrate and emit audible, acoustic sound, without the use of conventional speakers. Filtered by the material properties of tungsten and glass, the bulbs sing and crackle in a chorus of electronic static.
The event used eight massive light bulbs, and two Kind DQX 6044 4-channel amplifiers provided the power. With all channels driven close to maximum into this unusual load, the amplifiers had to prove total reliability and also had to pass the performance quality approval of the artists.
Stuart Cunningham, general manager of CUK Audio, commented, "This was an interesting project and an opportunity to learn more about combining products and art. The Kind amplifiers performed impeccably in providing this unusual event's combination of light and sound."
(Jim Evans)
