Residual Noise festival explores the creative power of sound

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] - Can the study of sound inspire change-making creativity? For Ed Osborn, a professor of visual art and music at Brown University, the answer is an unequivocal "yes."

Osborn set out to prove it with Residual Noise, a thought-provoking, open-to-the-public festival of sound that took place across the Brown and Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) campuses in early April as part of the Brown Arts Institute's IGNITE series.

Created with Shawn Greenlee and Alex Chechile of RISD's Studio for Research in Sound and Technology, Residual Noise leveraged extraordinary talent from across the country and cutting-edge audio technology on both campuses to share the expansive world of sound studies with the Providence community, inspiring attendees to think more deeply about the seemingly mundane things they hear daily.

"'Residual Noise' comes from a term used in analog recording," Osborn said. "Sometimes you'd erase a tape but a little bit of signal would be left behind, and we called that 'residue.' People usually thought of the residue as noise they didn't want or didn't know what to do with - it's an artifact of working with audio technologies. Residual Noise is all about inhabiting the practice of making sound, studying sound and creatively exploring the ways that sound, even 'residue,' carries meaning."

In addition to a daylong conference packed with conversations between artists and scholars, festival attendees had the opportunity to attend sound installations such as "Before the Rainbow," a piece by Senior Lecturer in Music Jim Moses that synthesized raindrops, wind and waves into "pink noise," inviting people to rethink and pay closer attention to the quotidian sounds of nature. Some also took in spatial audio concerts featuring pieces like JayVe Montgomery's "Lake Black Town," which used field recordings from lakes created after the Tennessee Valley Authority displaced about 125,000 Black residents to build dams.

"Many of the artists we featured use sound as a method of inquiry," Osborn said. "On top of being artists, they're also scholars of history or language or Earth science. This was our chance to showcase all of the inspiring ways in which people at Brown, RISD and in the Providence community are working with and thinking about sound."

At the center of Residual Noise was Brown's state-of-the-art Lindemann Performing Arts Center and its main hall, which took the form of an ambisonic cube for the first time since The Lindemann opened in October 2023. Its main stage offers five performance configurations, enabled by rearrangeable walls, floors and lighting grids.

According to Shawn Tavares, senior technical director for the Brown Arts Institute, transforming the space from a symphonic concert hall into a flat-floored cube with an immersive sound system took nearly two weeks and close to a dozen BAI employees and members of the Brown ArtsCrew workforce development program.

"It looks easier from the outside than it really is behind the scenes, and it takes a whole team to pull off," Tavares said. "But there's something amazing about walking into the space and going, 'Wow, the walls moved! The floor moved!' It's its own art form."

Osborn said the cube formation allows large groups of people to experience The Lindemann's ambisonic speaker array: a spherical surround-sound system that's rare to encounter in a venue this large.

"I want people to come away having had a really rich acoustic experience in this space and thinking about all the creative possibilities it holds," Osborn said. "More than that, I just want everyone to get to know all the different ways people are using and thinking about sound today. Some of it might seem very new and mysterious, but I'm confident there are lots of points of connection to make."