'The Pantomime Ballet' is a collection of 'sonified paintings' which explore the notion of the exhibition as an inclusive, interactive experience. The movement of sound behind the paintings incites a choreography in the viewer's involvement with the works, instigating an awareness of the exhibit as a whole in symbiosis with the gallery space and the participating viewer. The semiotic nature of the paintings, in partnership with their sonic component, draws on the proliferation of symbolism in the media rich pantomime that is our day to day environment.

Initial sketch of the proposed installation

The installation consists of twenty framed paintings, each containing a speaker mounted behind the canvas. These are wired individually to a small control box which contains a cassette player, amplifier and motor driven switch

The cassette player provides the amplifier with a two channel soundtrack. One channel passes directly to a speaker inside the control box, whilst the other passes to the motor driven switch. This is a mains powered device comprising twenty terminals that distribute the output of the cassette player seamlessly to each of the speakers in sequence according to the rotary motion of the motor. Depending on the sequence of the paintings the result is that the sound "passes behind the paintings" and follows the arrangement in which they are hung.

The work was first exhibited as part of the OX1 festival held at Brookes University in October 2001. The space in this instance was a long, narrow corridor where the paintings were hung along the entire length of one wall. This meant that at each point in the corridor the sound travelled endlessly and cyclically along the length of the space via the individual focii of the paintings .

Installation views of the Brookes show.

A side effect of the installation is that irregularities in the construction of the enclosures for the speakers/paintings means that each one has a slightly different resonant frequency, which causes each enclosure to render the output of the sound differently. This cannot be replicated anywhere except in the exhibition!

The music itself consists of birdsong on one channel (fed to the single speaker in the control box) and an eleven note melody derived from the arrangement of three sine waves on the other channel (fed to the switch and paintings). The arrangement is based around three rising scales arranged in rings; the innermost ring plays eight notes along with two from the second ring and one note from the third ring. The notes from the innermost ring increase equally in pitch with each full cycle of the innermost ring. The notes in the second ring rise with each cycle of the second ring, and the note derived from the third cycle increases with each cycle of the third ring. The end result is a climbing, serial melody which unfolds slowly towards a high pitched climax (before, of course, starting again).