Ben Rubin

Ben Rubin was born in 1964 in Boston, MA. He creates media installations and performance works. He is a frequent collaborator with Laurie Anderson, Ann Hamilton, Beryl Korot, Arto Lindsay, Diller+Scofidio, Steve Reich, the Builders Association, and other artists. Rubin teaches sound design at New York University, where he is working to advance sound and acoustics as creative disciplines. He has been granted artistic residencies by the Banff Centre for the Arts and at the STEIM Foundation, and he was recently awarded the 2000 Arts in Multimedia grant by the Brooklyn Academy of Music and Bell Labs. He is the director of EAR Studio, a multimedia design studio in New York City that he founded in 1993.

Tangible arose out of my fascination with the tactile aspects of film, in which sound effects and "Foley" sounds are the primary means of communicating the sense of touch. Critic Michel Chion invented the notion of a "materializing sound index" to refer to the aspects of sound - texture, grain, patterns of irregularity - the presence or absence of which determines how "material" a sound feels. In films like The Ice Storm and Barton Fink, sound designer Skip Lievsay renders scenes that feel frozen, sticky, stifling or rusty by using sounds that express these qualities. At the other end of the spectrum, Jaques Tati's films use sound to flatten and erase the material qualities of his on-screen world, avoiding realistic sounds in favor of exaggerated effects that border on abstraction.

The five short compositions that make up Tangible are inscribed to varying degrees with a sense of tactile materiality; the sounds of wind, breath, falling water, metal, and ice are palpable, while the electronic and vocal sounds are less so. The perceived tactile properties of the sounds are modulated through rhythm and repetition, and through filtering and resynthesis.

Thanks to Kyle DeKamp (first laugh), Coco McPherson (last laugh), Jim Metzner (metal and ice) and Arto Lindsay.