Building a speaker-instrument with Jenny Gräf Sheppard

Are you working with sound art, experimental music or sculpture, and would you like to experiment with building a sculpture that can also work as a speaker? Now you have the opportunity to participate in a 3-day workshop with sound artist and researcher Jenny Gräf Sheppard, where we build unpredictable sounding speakers out of found materials like tree branches, bark, stones, wood, metal or other.

Objects with the following properties are especially suitable: firm but flexible like large pieces of bark, very thin but firm plastic sheets, things that have a sound already like large seedpods or thin porcelain or metal. We will also provide some materials to choose from, should you prefer.

At the start of the workshop, we will learn about the historical development of the speaker and its different applications as well as the history of transduction, where one form of energy is converted into another (such as electronic signal to audible sound). In addition we will discuss notions of control and dialogue with energies in instruments, which Gräf herself is invested in.

Through hands-on experimentation, the group will explore and enter into dialogue with the materials and energies in play while creating an experimental speaker. Participants will and how the various elements of their individual speaker and chosen sound sources being fed into them influence the way energies are expressed, from the electromagnetic, the kinetic, vibrational and sonic. The workshop ends with a public presentation at Samsø Library, where all the built speaker sculptures will be performed together.

Jenny Gräf Sheppard is an artist and musician based in Copenhagen. She has been spending the last few years building porcelain sound speakers that she performs with as “speaker-instruments”, sculptural forms that make unpredictable sounds and kinetic movements when playing sound through them. She has been exhibiting large ensembles of speaker-instruments in spatial sound exhibitions in Denmark, Sweden and Poland. For a glimpse of her work, see a short documentation of her most recent exhibition at Trafo Center for Contemporary Art in Szczecin Poland in 2024 here.

Send a short motivation incl. introduction of yourself no later than January 3rd to terraform.island@gmail.com

Terraform and Sound Art Lab will select up to 15 participants – answers will be received the following week.

The workshop is part of the project ‘Sounds of the Future’ and supported by Region Midtjyllands Kulturudviklingspulje and Samsø Kommunes Kulturpulje.