By Mitchell Akiyama and Brady Peters, Bentway Artists-in-Residence

Sound is both unruly and orderly; it spills and seeps, and it causes adjacent bodies to vibrate in sympathy. Subject to the near-perfect geometry of manufactured forms, sound behaves in unpredictably predictable ways. For instance: the cylindrical pipes that channel clean water into our homes and drain our waste cause sound waves to collect and condense, concentrating air pressure into a constant vibration that appears to our ears as a musical tone.

Mimicking the drainage infrastructure of The Bentway (the PVC pipes that carry rainwater down from the Gardiner Expressway) Mitchell Akiyama and Brady Peters have created a series of sonic sculptures that pose as infrastructure, albeit of an unusual sort. Listening in at the openings of the pipes, visitors hear subtle, resonant, pitched drones that are the product of the pipe’s geometry modulated and excited by the soundscape of The Bentway. The Distribution of Sensation offers a confusion as to the purpose and function of infrastructure, prompting the possibility that curious aesthetics experiences are always latent in the built environment.