Sound Potty: acoustic manifold

Beneath the furry blue and black exterior of Michael Norris’ instrument Sound Potty is a small labyrinth of irrigation tubing, mobile phone condenser microphones, and an air filter from a Holden Commodore. All of this works to produce an amazing acoustic chamber for bending and filtering all sorts of sounds.

Norris wrapped fourteen different lengths of tubing around the air filter, each tube and contour of tube offering a different filtering of sound. The tubes curl around in two symmetrical bunches, forming small chambers, each containing a mobile phone condenser microphone. The chambers are acoustically shielded using everything from lead sheeting to old socks. The manifold is then mounted into a wooden box, covered in blue fur with black spots. Audio output jacks, batteries, and a volume control are located amongst the fur.

So with the acoustic manifold constructed, what to do with it? Norris used a myriad of sound making devices: tin clickers, Chinese chime balls, marbles rolling in a tin, sparks from a gas lighter, crinkling foil… the possibilities were endless. Once descended into the manifold, moving objects around would bend and alter the pick-up and filter of sounds. A ‘near-to-far’ effect by lifting the object up and down from the plane of the tubes, or an ‘up-down’ effect by moving the object towards the longer tubes (lower filter) or shorter tubes (higher filter).

Norris twice performed the Sound Potty live in Brisbane before retiring it to a shed at his parent’s place in Nambour.