Yahrzeeit I

Daniel Fishkin and Janine Wang

Yahrzeeit I

2024

Sycamore, pressure transducer, amplifier, audio player

circuit/aplifier 13.5" x 7 bowl/speaker 12" di

Artist Statement

I met Phil Brown in 2017, during my Windgate ITE Residency. Soon after meeting, we plotted a collaboration. Unfortunately, he got too sick too fast, and we were never able to start it. 

I had the idea that Phil would turn a wet bowl, and I’d record the sound of it drying and cracking with extremely sensitive microphones. Then, after recording the bowl, I would turn it into a loudspeaker cone, connecting a pressure transducer to it and playing a recording of the drying bowl into itself. Then, you could hear the sound of the bowl crackling again, as if it were drying perpetually. 

Of course, different shapes and thicknesses of bowls could have specific resonant properties. Also, I wondered how individual wood species would sound—for example, I can imagine oak or ash might sound totally different from maple or walnut as they dry.

So I asked my collaborator, Janine Wang, to turn this wet bowl, and after receiving it, I noticed that I could not hear a thing with my own ears! I set up the microphones and put on the headphones, but the bowl was indeed silent, even though I had turned up the microphone gain to the maximum level. I decided to record overnight to see if anything happened, for perhaps the water inside the bowl simply hadn’t begun to change states.

Nothing had happened overnight, I confirmed, upon listening in the morning. Was this idea I had five years ago even possible? Did I ever really hear the sound of a bowl drying when Max Brosi (ITE 2017) handed me a bowl during our residency, or was that a fabricated memory in the first place? The next night, I was glumly Googling online to see if anyone had ever posted anything about the sound of bowls drying. Then some spirit told me, “Hey, put on the headphones." So I did. There it was! The drying had begun, and the bowl was singing.

I recorded for the next 48 hours, an aria of creaks and cracks punctuated by occasional rumbles of the plumbing system in the basement and acousmatic stirrings of mammals rustling in the depths. You hear it now, the bowl singing its drying song again. But this five-hour excerpt is something of a fabrication—I could never hear these sounds with my own ears and so I used the microphone like a microscope to retrieve these very quiet sounds. It sounds a little bit like a flame. A Yahrzeit candle is a memorial candle, lit in commemoration for the dead. Phil Brown has gone, but his deeds, dreams, and memories live on if we tend to their spark.

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