The Organ of Corti recycles sound from the environment, enhancing or reducing the frequencies to create a new soundscape for the listener.
Conceived by composer David Prior and architect Frances Crow as sound artists Liminal Ltd, the Organ is a series of cylinders arranged to focus or diffuse sound waves.
Keith Attenborough OU Professor of Acoustics described it as: “A meeting of physics and art”.
His expertise in the field of acoustic crystals led the pair to create the organ, or rather two – named after parts of the inner ear.
Each was designed to react with different soundscapes.
One, called Cochlea Unwound, is a permanent installation recycling the sounds of water at a weir in Worcester.
The Organ of Corti itself was employed as a travelling version to be ‘parked’ by a motorway, on a busy street or at a festival with members of the public immersing themselves in the sound it shapes.
Last year the Organ won a £50,000 new music prize and, in November 2011 the Noise Abatement Society John Connell Award for Innovation was jointly made to Liminal Ltd and Keith Attenborough.
At a reception at the House of Commons the NAS judges said: “This unique and beautiful experimental instrument recycles noise from the environment.
“It does not make any sound of its own, but rather uses sounds already present by framing them in a new way.
“By recycling surplus sounds from our environment, it offers new and pleasurable ways of listening to what is already there.”
Keith said the organ’s arrangement of four metre tall acrylic poles “does interesting things to sound.”
They enhance or reduce certain characteristics of the sound and, he said: “They get people to listen to sound a bit more and invent their own kind of music as they move through the sculpture.”
He said he was pleased the Organ had been recognised again - particularly as he had worked with Noise Abatement Society founder the late John Connell in the 1970s.
"I was working on the first OU Technology Foundation Course and we had 4,000 students with noise meters.
"We were able to create the first noise maps," he said.
- See more about The Organ of Corti or play the video. here:
