TRANS HARMONICS

An Interactive Public Artwork for Nashville's Music City Center

Trans Harmonics is a dynamic public artwork for Nashville's new Music City Center, based on the phenomenon of standing waves and harmonic relationships. The artwork creates a visualization of the underlying physics of sound created on traditional stringed instruments as well as the harmonic waves of cultural influence that will pass through Nashville’s new Music City Center. Constructed of simple electronic and mechanical components, the artwork will cycle through different harmonic modes and react to activity and ambient sound levels within the room, providing a hypnotic and graceful celebration of the physicality of sound and our immersion in it, as played out on the artwork’s long, ever-shifting strings.

Trans Harmonics looks to the traditional instruments the heart of Nashville’s musical heritage -- guitar, banjo, mandolin, bass, and fiddle. The music we associate with Nashville originates these instruments’ long, vibrating strings, in what are essentially standing waves, made up of particular frequencies and amplitudes. The strings’ vibrations represent both the passed-down cultural traditions still resonating in today’s music, and the real-time waves of influence that spread across the country, carried abroad in the music written, recorded and performed in Nashville every day..

The artwork will also interact with occupants of the Music City Center: an audio level sensor will gather data on ambient sound levels within the room, allowing the standing waves to respond to nearby activity. As occupancy increases and ambient sound levels go up, the standing waves will begin to change, eventually all vibrating on coordinated harmonic intervals or increasing speed and size of the waves’ combined movements.
ctions play in the dissemination of this shared musical culture.

Visitors will witness a physical representation of the most basic origins of the sounds we are so used to hearing, and they will sense an interplay that speaks to the role our social interactions play in the dissemination of this shared musical culture.

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