Instrumentation

Light Switch Boards

Duration

ca. 3-4 minutes

Composer’s Note

Flicker is a piece that came about by accident. A long bored day at home during a time after hours of doing homework and housekeeping we had left our rooms in our apartment to stretch our legs and flicked on the light switch in the hallway. Our ears sort of perked up at the pitch difference between turning the lights on and off. We began to brainstorm what makes the pitches different and what amplifies the sound of the switches. We then came upon the idea to play with a few switches and make rhythms with them and decided to put pen to paper.

In order to organize this piece we needed to figure out how to mount the switches in a way that was easily accessible but also held the gang boxes and had a housing that could work with the sound amplification. A few different sketches were drawn up but ultimately we came up with an open-box design which mounted the switches on a table-like surface and an access port in the front to house compressor mics or contact mics. This design led to more ideas involving utilizing the box itself for sound as well. From the start we knew this piece would be a little more theatrical and we both knew that we were going to have a lot of fun on the creative side of this project.