Voicewriter
Meghan Trainor, 2010

Voicewriter is a site-specific work created during my recent residency at the James W. Washington, Jr. and Janie Rogella Washington Foundation in Seattle’s Central District.
Mr. Washington was a celebrated local artist best known for his stone sculpture celebrating natural forms.  He was friends with Mark Tobey and a member of the “Northwest School” of painters during the mid-twentieth century. Over his long life he gave many talks on his philosophies of art, beginning with a presentation to African-American Navy men in 1945.  During my residency I dove deep into the archives, listening to many of Mr. Washington’s recorded speeches, and in his vast library finding a unique annotation system that mapped very directly to his talks.  Using a star system, along with various underlines and notations, Mr. Washington revealed the trajectory of his research rough these texts. Early in his life he worked as an electrician for the military, amongst many other jobs, and his fascination with gadgets is evident in his sizable collection of Edison Voicewriter devices.  Having long worked with my recorded voice in my installation work I set about recording from Mr. Washington’s annotated texts onto wax cylinders.
The digitized recordings were then composed within Supercollider, a digital sound synthesis environment. Taking oak lampshades, another of Mr. Washington’s many collections of objects lingering throughout his vast work spaces, I constructed a form to house the wax cylinders, inset laser cut panels were generated using Grasshopper, a parametric plug-in for Rhino, a 3D modeling environment. Mr. & Mrs. Washington’s greenhouse became a listening chamber, housing both the audio composition created using his materials and tools, and the physical response to the greenhouse itself.