Polycarbonate costume with 16 loudspeakers and sampler.
Performers wear electroacoustic instruments shaped into a peacock’s fan-like plumage that are highly directional — projecting the sound into a space like an oversized radar dish. They are equipped with digital samplers and loop/pitch mechanisms that allow them to change the sound.
Much in the same way that the courtyard peacock “strutts his stuff” in front of a pea-hen and imposes with his awesome cry, so does the Audio Peacock stalk his architectural domain — using sound as a scalpel that cuts through air and sculpts it, transforming it to into his new realm.
An Audio Peacock can either amplify and alter its own voice or electronic instruments using a microphone, sampler, and filters (loop + pitch), play pre-recorded sounds, or receive live sounds via transmitter/receiver.
As VIDEO PEACOCK (wearing white plexiglass “skins“) these electroacoustic birds patrol a more limited space and darkened environment. Their audio costumes double as mobile projection screens: whenever their paths intersect the light of a video projector the costumes metamorphasize into multi-colored screens. Colorful visualizations (movies, pictures, texts, internet blogs, computer-enhanced images and closed circuit camera views) are “beamed“ onto them as they play their sounds. As a multi-phonic installation the parcours of these “cyber-birds“ is choreographed vis-a-vis to the emplacement of the projectors in the architectural space.
Benoît Maubrey is the director of DIE AUDIO GRUPPE a Berlin-based art group that build and perform with electro-acoustic clothes and dresses (equipped with amplifiers and loudspeakers) that make sounds by interacting thematically and acoustically with their environment.
PDF: Audio Peacock
Videos:
Audio Peacocks invited as mobile sound sculptures to the suburban community of Hellersdorf / Berlin. With their samplers they record their own voices and those of of passersby , alter them and compose them into live multiacoustic concerts.