kies multichannel sound installation, gravel bed, LRA motors
10 min · 2026

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A gravel bed becomes a transmission medium. The starting point is the way insects communicate through substrate: by tapping, rubbing and trembling they set plants, wood and soil vibrating, in signals that work as call and response, luring, disruption, deception.

Under the gravel, thirty-two linear resonant actuators — the vibration motors used in mobile phones — move individual stones. Crackling, clicking, trickling; short tremors gather, shift and disperse. Some passages are composed, some generative, and some transcribed or derived from field recordings of substrate-borne insect signals.

For the version at the HBK Braunschweig Rundgang a track for 32 loudspeakers was added, built from the hiss of the amplifiers driving the piece, cars passing the room outside, and the plastic sacks relaxing after the gravel had been emptied out of them. It is spatialised across the room and barely audible.