“Let me show you something,” says Oliver Beer. He rummages around his whitewashed, light-flooded loft apartment near London’s Waterloo, where various objets have been arranged with immaculate taste: a metronome, a 16mm projector, an improbably tall stack of books, his own art hanging on every wall. “Ah, this will do,” he says, emerging with a ceramic painted vase in the shape of a giraffe’s head, resembling something from a child’s bedroom. He lifts the vessel’s opening to his lips and sings in a high-pitched tone, like the soft hoot of an owl. He probes various notes until he hits bullseye: the air starts to audibly vibrate and his voice is amplified into an almighty swell far more powerful than one human should be able to make.
He has found the resonant note of this ceramic giraffe. This is called the Helmholtz resonance, and every vessel has one. “There isn’t a single pot in the history of the world that doesn’t have a musical note inside,” says Beer. “Every ceramicist, when they finish a pot, they finish a note. It’s the same for buildings. When you build a building, you build a note.” So he goes around singing into vases, rooms and buildings, into antique Persian vessels and the entire Sydney Opera House. Finding resonant notes is the starting point for much of his art, which spans sound, film, performance and painting. Each project finds a new dimension to his ongoing exploration of how sonic resonance connects us humans to each other and to our past.
