SILENT CAVE|BELL

Olya Dubatova and Greg Niemeyer

24th – 25th MARCH 2018
Cave Garden

A meditation on communication technologies, cave|bell is an art installation for Mount Gambier’s caves and galleries. It features a bell music composition based on Russian and Indonesian bell rituals called Zvon and Gamelan. The bell music will play in the Mount Gambier Garden Cave from 1 pm to 10 pm, every hour on the hour, for a few minutes. The composition is algorithmic, meaning that the melody and layering of one section will return, with modifications, in the second section, an hour later. Listeners are invited to detect these differences.

The bell sounds themselves don’t come from real bells, but rather from bells created by a computer that “learns” to make bell sounds based on real bell recordings with machine learning. One bell in particular, the Russian Tsar Bell, takes center stage. Cast in 1732, the 200-ton bell broke before it ever rang. But the artists, together with a team of scientists, develop a sonic model for how the bell would have sounded.