Parable of the Harmoniums

In Kurt Vonnegut’s 1959 novel The Sirens of Titan, Harmoniums are a race of small bat-like creatures that inhabit the caves of Mercury, subsisting on the sound waves emanating from each other’s calls to one another. The Harmoniums’ simple ecosystem is ultimately disrupted upon the arrival of the Martian war survivors Boaz and Unk, the former of whom introduces the Harmoniums to recorded music from Earth. While the Harmoniums derive great pleasure from the music, direct contact with the tape player causes them to shrivel and die from overexposure which happens in the book when Boaz leaves the cassette player unattended for a short period of time. Parable of the Harmoniums uses this moment in the book as a point of reflection on the negative impact of unchecked vice and excess consumption can have on a society and/or ecosystem.

In Parable of the Harmoniums, the audio signal from the saxophone and guitar is manipulated through a series of loopers, live- generated sound, and audio effects that are distributed between the main stereo outputs and a series of transducers placed on an electric guitar. Interaction between the resonance of the electric guitar and the transducers creates an isolated sonic ecosystem that is reliant on input from the performers and electronics to exist, but is vulnerable to being erased by the same forces that allow it to exist in the first place. The works of Leo Brouwer and Heitor Villa-Lobos serve as inspiration for many of the techniques and chord shapes used in the guitar part, which are further corrupted by the introduction of simple dissonances in both the guitar and saxophone.