Thomas TILLY
“Test – Tone documents”

Test/Tone – Installation for plans, recordings and speakers. La Cartonnerie/Palais du Tau, Reims (France), 2007.
“Through the filters constituted by a building’s walls and the complex electrical network composing its nervous system, sound appears as a residual matter of the building’s activities, eroded by the architecture. The geographical situation of these aucoustical phenomena is representative of this activity’s nature.Test/Tone is a listening space, created through a study of the building that hostes La Cartonnerie, dedicated to amplified music and composed by two concert halls, several studios, technical premises and a reception area. The space is defined by ten loudspeakers wich broadcast a work exclusively composed of sound recordings made in the building. These recordings (vibrations, magnetic fields and sounds from influx of visitors or employees working) put foreward some almost inaudible resonant images of the building. The loudspeakers’ placing inside the device has been determined while picking up sounds by a cartographical work making the place’s most important zones of intense sound flows appear.A work of urban phonography, Test/Tone is both a retranscription on a reduced scale of a place’s geography and an enlargement of it’s sound environment.” Thomas Tilly, 2007.