Karlheinz Stockhausen’s HELICOPTER String Quartet is developed from the Licht (Light) superformula. The string players simply play the instruments on the helicopter; the sound of the rotor blade blends so well with the sound from the tremolos creating a rhythm that produces a melody called Helicopter String Quartet (Stockhausen, n.d.). He said that ‘[t]he buzzing made by lots of bees is a magic sound to me. The violin invokes the sound of a buzzing mosquito, so “what the composer is also saying is that the mosquito is also a tiny helicopter”, and the connection between the two is being made by the violin’ (Stockhausen, n.d.). As for the drawing for his scores, he mixes up the 4 color lines, 4 sounds, rather than separating them. This personally is a form of artwork by mixing the buzzing noise or repeated sounds from a movement with other different sounds to produce a fined and interesting melody.

In my sound recording, I made a mixture between repeated noises occurring in my everyday life. From the sound of footstep to the sound of people chatting, there are tons of repeated noise happening around us in the city that we are unconsciously aware and unaware of; they can work as either a main sound or a background noise. With this concept, instead of using a sound which is uncommon and unnatural like helicopter’s rotor blade noises, I used a sound of my footsteps as a buzzing noise which works as the main focus. To make the recording more interesting, I recorded the noises of people chatting in the Central Station South Concourse to serve as a background.

Here is the link to the sound clip:

There are two main recordings of my footsteps sounds, which have repeated rhythms, representing by the two big black circles (Figure 2). The whole sound clip is divided into four sections and so does the two big circles. Within the first section of the record, the left circle begins with each of the two main footstep’s records, and then finished with the mixture of the two. After that, in the second section, I began to mix people noises in which is represented by the leak of the ink in the big circle on the left (Figure 3). The third and fourth section goes back to just the mixture of the two footstep’s recordings. This is why there is no leaks in the first, third and fourth sections of the circle on the left. On the right big circle, there are 7, 4 and 1 ‘ding’ sound in the second, third and fourth section respectively. And, the ‘dings’ sounds are depicted by the small circles around the big black circle on the right (Figure 4).

As for the technique used for painting, I firstly use water as a base before I drop my watercolor inks on the base. The watercolor spreads out to random directions inside the water base. The ink spreads give unusual and unpredictable shapes to the drawing. Furthermore, the choice of the color blue is to illustrate other sounds other than the footsteps noise which is why there are blue inks on both the 12 small circles (Figure 4) and the leaked part (Figure 3). The color also works as a bridge connecting the two big black circles together (Figure 2) since each circle creates beats, rhythms and bond that could not be separated like my right and left footsteps. Below are some of the experiments I did before producing the final drawings. It is for shape testing, ink testing and the paper’s breeding testing.

Below are some of the experiment: 

James, R. 2013, MUSIC FOR DRONES: INTRODUCTION, <https://www.its-her-factory.com/2013/02/music-for-drones-introduction/>.

Stockhausen n.d., Introduction to helicopter string quartet, <http://www.stockhausen.org/helicopter_intro.html>.