Nationality American | Website margaretnoble.net | |
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Movement Sound artInstallation artSound sculpture Education | ||
Margaret Noble (born 1972) is an American sound artist, installation artist, electronic music composer and former house music DJ. She is based in San Diego, California.
Contents
- Early life and education
- House music 2002 07
- Frakture 2009 10
- Sound art and installations 2012 present
- Albums
- Compilations
- Solo shows
- Group shows and collaborations selected
- Honors and awards
- References
Early life and education
Noble was born in Waco, Texas, and grew up in the City Heights neighborhood of San Diego, moving there in 1982 at the age of 9. She earned a BA in philosophy from the University of California at San Diego, and an MFA in sound art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2007. Her training in dance and participation in the rave scene in the 1990s inspired her to make music. She taught herself to use turntables.
House music (2002-07)
As a house music DJ, Noble performed internationally at underground clubs. In 2002, she moved to Chicago, Illinois, to pursue the house music scene there. She had several nightclub DJ residencies and hosted a monthly showcase, performing alongside DJs including DJ Spooky and Derrick Carter. She spent five years as a DJ in Chicago. After earning a master's in sound art and, following art residencies in Europe, in 2007 she moved to San Diego to teach media production at High Tech High School in Point Loma while continuing her sound art practice.
Frakture (2009-10)
In 2009, Noble created an experimental radio piece that blended industrial noises, recorded dialogue and connective music, with eight speakers in surround sound, as a remix of a 1953 vinyl recording of George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. In 2010, she released Frakture, an eight-track audio collage of analog synthesizer, acoustic drums, recordings of healthcare protests, contemporary political propaganda, emergency alarms, the New York Stock Exchange, dice rolling and other sounds, based on a radio play adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four. On the recording, Noble reads excerpts from the text of Orwell's novel. The first track of Frakture, "Safer is Better", won first place in the 2013 Electronic Music Composition Contest from Canada's Musicworks magazine.
Sound art and installations (2012-present)
In August 2012, Noble's installation 44th and Landis opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. The large-scale multimedia art piece combined Victorian-style paper dolls with 1980s urban influences based on her upbringing in San Diego's City Heights neighborhood, and included a performance by Noble. The show's visual centerpiece was a hanging series of 100 paper dolls, along with paper-doll clothing, objects and architecture.
In her 2016 interactive piece What Lies Beneath, she worked in sound sculpture, creating a tall wooden box with instructions next to it to raise the lid, which caused sounds of organ pipes, truck brakes and other dissonance to emit. The person interacting with it can control the sound with the lid, with a "storm" inside the box.
Her piece Head in the Sand features a wooden box sitting on four legs with a head-sized hole in the top and instructions to put your head in the hole and wait. Inside is a chambered light and sound show, with soft pastoral sounds, the hole serving as a sanctuary from the art exhibit itself. Head in the Sand was included in her 2016 exhibition Resonating Objects at South Puget Sound Community College in Olympia, Washington. The exhibition was an interactive mixture of sound, sculpture and video. It also included I Long to Be Free From Longing and Material Shrine for the New Class, which features dangling objects the visitor can squeeze to activate different sounds.
Her 2016 sound art installation Time Strata, a public art commission for The Port of San Diego at the Cesar Chavez Park pier in San Diego consists of three sound sculptures made of materials including vintage buoys, hunks of bamboo, bells, stainless steel and harp strings, along with sounds of creatures like snapping shrimp in the water under the pier. Microphones are placed around the pier, with the sound fed into a mixer and then into four digital consoles where participants can sample and alter the sounds.
Other notable pieces include The Collector, where Noble worked with puppeteers Animal Cracker Conspiracy and visual directors Bridget Rountree and Iain Gunn, creating a multi-layered soundscape that used animated video, live video projection and puppetry to tell a story of a debt collector; Righteous Exploits, a 2013 experimental performance created with Justin Hudnall, using a combination of live audio and video multimedia and performance art; and her 2014 interactive sound installation I Long to Be Free From Longing, which won first place in the 23rd annual Juried Exhibition at the Athenaeum Music & Arts Library in San Diego.