A Trippy Orchestra Made Entirely From Lamps and Electricity

Next time you flip on a lamp, lean in and listen closely for the soft buzz of electricity. You might not be able to hear it on your dinky IKEA task lamp, but it’s there coursing through the cables. This silence is a good thing—most lamps are designed to be that way—unless you’re Fabio Di Salvo and Bernardo Vercelli.

The duo of italian artists makes up Quiet Collective, a studio that focuses on sound performance. For their most recent piece, The Enlightenment, they’ve taken the soft hum of electricity and turned it into a booming orchestra of sound and light. “Usually this is the sound that disturbs concerts and performances,” he says. “But we’re taking it up as loud as possible to make it our own instrument.”

The orchestra is made from 96 lamps—neon tubes, spotlights, theatre rigs and strobes—all of which produce their own sound. The neon tubes, for example, are meant to mimic the whining sound of a violin, the strobes are percussion. Salvo and Vercelli rigged each of the lamps with a copper coil that could deliver programmed electrical currents. You can see the choreographed voltage through flashing lights and hear it thanks to sensors which communicate the currents to a computer (through Ableton Live) and amplifies them into an ominous buzz.

The setup is effectively giving lamps a voice, which is an interesting idea to ponder. At its most practical, similar technology has sonified imperceptible noises like the clicking communication among plants.

At its most poetic, you could consider that each object we encounter has a secret, hidden life. Even the things we think to be inanimate have a vitality and energy to them. As Vercelli puts it: “If you look deeper and open your eyes and ears you can see and hear things. Most things have their own special life, you just have to pay attention.”