The British Council’s craft conference ‘Making Futures’ at Cebu, the Philippines March 6-8th 2020.

I presented a paper at the conference looking at the pressure of technology on craft traditions. Here is the abstract I presented.  

 ‘Transitioning analogue traditional bell making to the digital 3D Additive Manufacturing processes for new acoustic experience.

 Abstract: 

The digital design and technology revolution makes possible up new acoustic opportunities for bells that have been cast and tuned in traditional materials and processes. This shift along the manufacturing continuum from analogue processes to digital design technologies has shown exciting opportunities for bells to be used in new urban acoustic design. The ‘Federation Bells Carillon’ in Melbourne (www.federationbells.com.au) and new bell design for the Longnow Foundation’s 10,000-Year Clock (www.longnow.org) as well as the first 3D printed bells in titanium and stainless-steel are rewriting the concept of ‘the bell’ in communal cultural experience.   This paper outlines the work of bell designer and founder Anton Hasell in these and other public-space projects. 

It was wonderful to listen to so many perspectives on traditional craft futures in an increasingly challenging world. The range of projects and start-up industries in craft and design practices presented at the conference, and the many intense discussions held between participants throughout the event was invigorating. Cebu hosted conference attendees admirably, in face of the covid19 constraint everyone was aware of. I expect interesting papers will be published from the presentations and that these will advance traditional crafting practice’s processes to navigate the changing, challenging global situation. 

In my presentation I tried to show that even in arcane and perhaps obscure traditional crafts like bell founding, whose origins emerge from the in the mist of history, there still exists a continuum of technology along which its processes can evolve, and should evolve to keep the craft relevant and vital, tuned into its community and the changes they make toward prosperity in a shifting future. 

Where traditional uses for bells is slowing in its demand for product design innovation and production volume, bell founder ought to seek new opportunities to bring the bell back to the community’s consciousness. My work in new bell design and digital design opportunities is oriented to applying the old acoustic ‘place-making’ and way-faring’ roles of bells to new urban design perspectives. New built ecologies ought to include acoustic and other multi-sensory experience in considered ways for increasing wellbeing in human habitats. 

Public-space architectures, like the Federation Bells Carillon in Melbourne, that encourage community members to engage in creative play with one another are also important sonic inclusions in contemporary urban design. Accessible, interactive and participatory public artworks from invigorated craft traditions build communal wellbeing while helping the community navigate uncertain futures through their tradition and history.   

3D printed bells created in the digital design space offer new sounds from new shapes and materials for new uses in contemporary urban design. The old bell, sounding at the centre of their traditional communities, is being reinvented to serve similar and new roles for contemporary communities changing rapidly in response to global challenges. 

Australian Bell invents the difference tone bell design for the 10,000-Year clock

As an artist deeply embroiled in my practice, two singular moments of inventive success stand out from the mass of small inventive iterations that constitute my work. The first of these delightful moments was on returning from observing bell casting in Japan in 1998 and seeing the world’s first harmonic bell, as a virtual design, that Professor Josef Tomas had optimised in his FEA software ‘ReShape’ based on the polystyrene coffee cup I had proposed as the starting point for his work. The other magical moment took place on a hot and sweaty day tuning a bell in my workshop in 2014 when, after months of grinding fragments of bronze test bells by hand to shift partial frequency ratios into their desired order, on striking the bell it sounded, for the first time ever, a ‘difference-tone’, that beautiful, elusive psychoacoustic pitch an octave below any actual frequency of the bell. This was the difference-tone that the ‘Reshape’ virtual bell model had predicted, but had failed to produce when the design was cast into bronze. I immediately sent the bell’s sound file to Danny Hillis and Zander Rose at the Longnow Foundation in great excitement and joy, knowing that this discovery would be as thrilling to them as it was for me.

I am now able to tell the story of the invention of the difference-tone bell and the casting and tuning of the ten difference-tone bells for the 10,000 Year Clock project currently underway in West Texas.     

The background for this work was the collaborative work of myself and Neil McLachlan, along with many other people, to create the Federation Bells Projects between 1998 and 2002. We collaborated with Professor Josef Tomas and his ‘ReShape’ Finite Elements Analysis (FEA) software to invent the Harmonic bell design and other new bell designs in 1999-2001. The harmonic bell design, in its various iterations, was the central bell design used for the Federation Bells Carillon in Melbourne. This carillon celebrates the centenary of the Australian Federation in 2001 (for more, see www.federationbells.com.au). Australian Bell was granted a US Patent on this bell design/sound. The three Federation bell projects Australian Bell was commissioned to undertake were the Federation Bells Carillon in Birrarung Marr Park, Melbourne, the 2001 harmonic handbells in 60 two-octave sets of 24 bells, and a two-octave set of larger harmonic bells for the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. 

In 1999 Danny Hillis asked Brian Eno for help with the bells for the clock and Brian  suggested that the Longnow Foundation’s Clock design use 10 bells ringing in a different order each day, following the ‘change-ringing’ tradition. Possible numbers of different ring patterns for 10 bells approximate the number of days in a 10,000-year period. 

‘ .
Brian Eno was familiar with Australian Bell’s work on bell design and introduced Danny Hillis to Australian Bell’s director, Dr Anton Hasell. In 2013, Danny Hillis began a discussion with me on the possibility of inventing a new bell design that would generate a ‘difference-tone’ when rung. Organ makers have long used the psychoacoustic principals of difference-tones in the design of their organs. Whereas the pitch C65 Hertz requires an organ pipe 64 feet in length, that very low note can also be achieved by sounding a 32-foot C130 Hertz pipe simultaneously with its perfect fifth G pipe. The difference-tone generated by the two pipes suggest to the listener’s ear that they hear the pitch C65 Hertz, when in fact, this is a pitch that is an octave below the 32-foot pipe’s sound compass. Danny Hillis had asked traditional bell founders if such a bell was possible and they thought not. 

The attraction of a difference-tone bell design was that the bell would be half the scale of a traditional bell of the same pitch, (just as the 32-foot organ pipe is half the length of the 64-foot organ pipe) allowing Brian Eno’s Mixolydian musical scale for the ten bells, with the lowest pitch at C 65 Hertz, to fit inside the clock structure, which is itself fitted inside a vertical tunnel bored into the mountain. 

I agreed to undertake a research project to find out if such a bell design was possible. In collaboration with Ryan Adams using ‘ReShape’ software, and starting with a conical harmonic bell design as the initial virtual profile (the choice of the virtual model is critical to successful FEA operations, as shown with the invention of the harmonic bell), and the software optimised a bell shape that predicted a difference-tone bell design. 

This virtual shape was 3D printed as a foundry pattern and used to cast a sample bell in silicon bronze. Disappointingly, the cast bell did not sound a difference-tone. I sent this bell casting and a similarly scaled conical harmonic bell cast in 316 stainless-steel to Danny Hillis in San Francisco and visited Danny, Alexander Rose and Stewart Brand at their San Rafael workshop in 2015 to discuss which of the two bell designs we should develop for the project. Danny Hillis asked me to continue to try to get the bronze bell design to sound a difference-tone. That is, to find the bell profile that did sound a given pitch exactly one octave below the bell’s lowest actual frequency.  Over a 3-month tuning period, through a process of carefully removing metal from several test bells (to their point of ‘tuning’ destruction) and mapping the subtle shifts in partial frequency ratios with each slight profile change, I was able to make a tuning map of the bell design. I used this map to tune a third casting and put its partial frequencies into the exact ratio needed to generate a difference-tone, psychoacoustic pitch. This ‘eureka’ moment was achieved in the Australian summer of 2015. 

   
We were all delighted, of course, and a bit surprised at how effective the difference-tone bell was at creating the aural illusion of a pitch an octave below the bell’s actual frequency. This did allow a bell to sound its pitch at typically half the scale of other bell designs sounding the same pitch. This invention would not have been possible without  ‘ReShape’ Finite Element Analysis software generating a bell profile within the ball-park needed to find the exact bell profile.

After inventing the bell, Australian Bell was then commissioned to design, cast and tune Brian Eno’s musical set of the ten bells required for the Longnow Foundation’s Clock project. These bells were produced in both Australian Bell’s’ Mia Mia bell foundry and in collaboration with Billmans Foundry in Castlemaine between 2015 and 2016. The bells, responding to the resonant frequency of the space they inhabit, range from G 392Hertz (difference-tone G 196Hz) with a mass of 21Kilograms to C 130.8 Hertz (difference-tone C 65.4Hertz) with a mass of 566 Kilograms. As the bells were cast and tuned they were crated and transported from Australia to San Rafael USA, with the first bell shipped mid 2015 and the largest bell shipped late 2016.

The Clock is still under construction and testing and the bells were installed in the Clock in 2019 as part of its 55,000 lb chime generator. The chime generator will ring the ten bells in a different sequence each time they chime over the next 10,000 years. Australian Bell remains the owner of the intellectual property the difference-tone bell design has generated.

Being invited to work with legendary inventors and thinkers on such an exquisite and sublime project has been an extraordinary privilege for me. The Clock is visionary in both its modelling of long-term thinking, fundamental for a sustainable civilization on our planet, and the technological ambition and inspirational design aesthetics we might expect from considerate ancestors.  Projects of this brilliance are exceedingly rare and I truly appreciate, and treasure the opportunity to make a small contribution offered to me. 

World Craft Council celebrates Anxi China as a Handicraft City.

I have recently returned from representing Australian metal craft at the celebration of the city of Anxi in China being granted WCC as a handicraft city. I was invited by the China Arts and Crafts Association as part of a delegation of metal workers and handcraft practitioners to collaborate with the metal craft and the rattan handicraft industries of Anxi on authenticity and excellence in product making. Six of us were trained in a cultural product program developed by Dr Joseph who has extensive experience working with traditional handicraft communities across Asia.

The WCC Award of excellence for handicraft pilot training of trainers were:

Ms. Rajeshwari Sathyanarayana from India,

Dr. Anton Hasell from Australia,

Mr. Prach Miyomkar from Thailand,

Ms. Vida Tavahodi from Iran,

Mr. Aziz Murtazaev from Uzbekistan

Ms. Sun Yueqi from Beijing

Two mentors from WCC, Ms. Manjari Nirula, Senior VP and AoE Committee Chair of WCC-APR and Mr. Indrasen Vencatachellum, Advisor of WCC also participated.

After our training we engaged with 30 Anxi local handicraft industry leaders to explore opportunities arising from improving authenticity and excellence in the products they manufactured for the market. It was an opportunity to show the 3D printed titanium bell and the elliptical bell cast in bronze from a 3D plastic print foundry pattern I took with me to share with interested Chinese metal craft producers as examples of innovation in digital design and digital manufacturing processes.

We also were privileged to join in the city-wide celebration of Anxi becoming a WCC handicraft City. Ms Rosy Greenlees, president of the WCC and the British Craft Council was present at the presentation ceremony along with Dr Ghada Hijjawai-Qaddumi president of WCC Asia Pacific Region.

Leonardo accepted paper on the acoustics of 3D direct-metal printed bells

The research paper co-written by Dr Anton Hasell, Australian Bell and Dr Daniel East, CSIRO on the acoustic outcomes of a known musical, traditionally cast, bronze bell with the same bell design now 3D printed in several different processes and differing metal materials has been accepted for publication by Leonardo. The datum bell design chosen was the ‘difference-tone’ bell designed by Anton Hasell for the Longnow Foundation’s 10,000-year Clock project. The Foundation, through Danny Hillis, asked if it was possible to invent a ‘difference-tone’ bell where the array of partial frequencies of the bell generated a difference-tone. A difference-tone is a psychoacoustic pitch effect in which the listener’s ear recognises a pitch one octave below the lowest actual pitch (the fundamental partial frequency) sounded in the bell. The effect of a difference-tone bell, if it could be invented, would be to half the scale of a bell at any given pitch. Working with Ryan Adams using Professor Tomas’ ReShape optimising software starting with a harmonic bell virtual profile model, the final optimised bell profile produced by the software was then translated from its virtual space into a real object through 3D printing in plastic. This plastic bell form was used as a foundry pattern to cast a replica silicon bronze bell. This cast bell did not sound a difference-tone when rung, against the prediction of the software optimisation. Months were spent with several other cast bronze test bells to manually tune the bell and map its partial frequency ratio shifts with small removals of metal in specific locations on the bells. The resulting mapping of ratio shifts allowed a final test bell to be tuned to sound a difference-tone when rung. This bell profile was used by Australian Bell, working with Billmans Foundry in Castlemaine, to cast the 10 musical difference-tone bells currently being installed within the Clock mechanism inside a mountain in Texas (see www.longnow.org).

A number of test difference-tone bells were 3D printed using laser fusion in titanium at the CSIRO’s Lab 22 in Clayton Victoria where Dr Daniel East is the director, and two difference-tone bells were printed in the USA using EXONE’s processes, one bell printed in 316 stainless-steel/tin bronze and another printed in 420 stainless-steel/tin bronze. The results of our analysis show that so long as the profile is maintained exactly in the various 3D printing direct-metal processes, the difference-tone effect was replicated in the printed bells. Given differing densities and elasticities of the metals used, the bells had differing pitch generations for the same sized bell. The full test results are soon to be available to interested researchers through the Leonardo publication.

Lorne Sculpture Biennale Scarlett Essay

awards@lornesculpture.com

Anton Hasell 

“Landfall” (or “land-ho”) are calls from a ship’s deck at sea on sighting land, in a quivering voice, laden with hope, and fear. Beaching a craft upon a shore radiant with the promise of treasure requires navigating crashing waves on rocky coastlines.

Once on shore though, land gives up its resources to its coloniser. Whether it be a small island, a continent or the planet, colonising scenarios have played out in full.  Sustainable futures for the seven and rising billon people feasting upon our planet looks evermore doubtful. 

We non-indigenous people who live in Australia find ourselves on an ancient land mass that is nearly, but not quite, familiar. It is a landscape with unique archetypal cadences, an ambient pulse that unsettles us, and against which our imported familiar architectures and garden-planting schemes act as a bulwark to its strangeness, keeping us émigrés to country. 

The palpable and visceral nature of Australian experience necessarily diminishes the visual dominance of cultural expression common to international arts. Here, the senses are interwoven in powerful and secret ways, and sound vibration over vast and shallow space shivers above and below the audible range, as felt pulsation, as electrical fizzing, as much tasted, touched and seen, as smelt and heard. Intuition alive to these complex sensory experiences can bring us in tune with country.  

If we can tune into country, wehave something useful to share with a world looking for sustainable co-habitation on their part of the planet. We can share our special listening experience with them. 

Listening is fundamental to our discovery of self and place of being. Everyone must find ways to live in tune, and in rhythm, with their landscapes. My exploration of the sonic experience of the Australian landscape is resulting in sculptural, multi-sensory forms worth listening to. In this way, I hope to share the subtle percussive sounds and invented listening experiences with my fellow citizens, and with people across the world. 

Accessible, interactive and participatory public art installations, like the Federation Bells Carillonat Birrarung Marr Park Melbourne, become sites of shared multi-sensory experience. This is an art experience beyond spectatorship and entertainment, inviting everyone to listen to the creativity of others. It is a listening experience for the positive energy of people. It is an invitation to creative play and the sharing of considered sensibilities. People anywhere in the world can download the Federation Bell Carillon Installation’s phone app, or use its web page, to compose music for this set of unique musical bells.  Imagine people joyfully engaged in accessible, participatory and responsive creative play. 

It offers a vision for public-space architectures connecting people with one another, and with the country they share with each other, listening for resonance and being sensitive and alive to the interwoven fields of vibration animating life all about them. People are composing with the fabulous and bewitching sounds of the Australian landscape vibrated from unique bronze forms.

Shivering bronze forms such as the harmonic bell, (a sound long sort in Europe but invented here) and the difference-tone bells installed in the 10,000-Year clock being buried inside a Texan mountain, or the newly invented Nao bell to be exhibited at the Chengdu Museum, all first sounded in Mia Mia, becoming unique resonant frequencies to this country, like the sounds of the bull-roarer and of the cockatoo.

Open, free, egalitarian, playful and ingenious creativity and invention, isn’t that what we Australians stand for in our cultural life? Shouldn’t this be our gift to a world in desperate need? That everyone gets to ‘have a go’ is not just a mantra for seeing if an idea works through participation, it is integral to the idea of ‘a fair go’, that powerful concept underwriting our community’s ingenuity (and the remaining hope for a prosperous future). Being sensitive to subliminal resonant frequencies and rhythms of our ancient landscape; tuning into country; this is the work of discovering who, and where, we are.

“Landfall” might be the call of someone’s pirate-maniacal imaginings of untold individual wealth appearing over the horizon, like those simple (it turns out, too simple) economic models of vast cattle farms, mineral mining and other schemes of exploitation that draw people to the heart of outback Australia. However, it can also be a call to tune into landfall’s siren song, to find oneself drawn to the irresistible sonic patterns that resonate and ricochet, reverberate and echo in, around, across and under the complex topological forms and vast open spaces of living country.  

It is my greater hope that this kind of investigation, of tuning into our country and of building joyful sites of shared creative play for all, can inform the kind of society needed to find a sustainable harmony with the planet we are so very crowded upon. 

Vale our friend Lawrence Argent

I celebrate the too-short life of my friend Lawrence Argent. Lawrence died late last year and it has been a terrible shock for his family and his friends. Lawrence and I met on our first day at RMIT Sculpture School in 1979 and became fast friends, sharing our lives as artists discovering the joys of creativity, imagination and craft skills required to manifest our insights into beauty and truth. We both delighted in the digital revolution's power to enhance our creative output, and although Lawrence moved to live in the USA during the early 1980s and I remained in Victoria Australia, we stayed in contact and made regular visits to each other between continents. 

Lawrence is the finest artist I have known, and his powerful insights and philosophical thinking are an inspiration to my practice as an artist. His artwork remains as a testament to a wonderful artistic vision and energy, and these artworks are to found across the USA and China especially. I think his master work is 'The Venus' in Market St, San Francisco. Commissioned by Angelo Sangiacomo of the Trinity Group, this masterpiece of sculpture is fabricated in polished stainless-steel and stands at a glorious 93 ft in the plaza space between a group of buildings. It is a wonder of the world and I encourage everyone to visit this sculpture and be amazed at the twisting surfaces and complex shapes the figure of The Venus makes as it is spun in a vortex of pure energy. I am so proud of my friend's brilliance as an artist, so sad not to have him near anymore and sad for his family and friends who lament the loss of his companionship, his dry humour, his sage insight and his great sense of fun and joy.   

3D printed Longnow bells in metal

You can find the series of blogs on the Synapse Residency at the ANAT blog AntonHasell 17. Here is the latest blog.

Lab 22 CSIRO is focussed on 3D printing directly in metal and the focus of my specific research in the Synapse program has been to discover the tuning effects of a known cast bell sound when the bell design has been 3D printed directly in metal.

Types of direct metal printing include using metal powders (titanium, stainless-steel and bronze amongst the most usual materials) placed in electron beam or laser heat sources to fuse the metal particles layer by layer. Alternative methods include accelerating particles to speeds high enough that they fuse with metallic layers already printed and the use of robotic arms and temperature-controlled environments in which electric arc (mig) welding continuously builds layers of fused metal. 

Dr Daniel East, Gary Savage and I wanted to see the results of printing process offered in the US by Exone Company using a system where stainless-steel powder is printed in layers with a resin to form a resin bound stainless-steel form which is placed in a kiln and has bronze powder added. At temperatures above 1011 Celsius the resin is burnt out and replaced with liquid bronze.  We ordered one Longnow Clock bell design in the materials 316 stainless-steel and a tin bronze of Cu 90% Sn 10%, and another in the materials 420 stainless-steel and the tin bronze, with a 60 % stainless to 40% bronze ratio.

I include pictures of both bells and note that both bells hold the partial frequency array of cast bronze bells, with both bells generating a difference tone, that is a pitch with a psychoacoustic effect of sounding one octave below the lowest actual partial frequency, its fundamental, sounded in the bell. I believe these to be the first ever 3D direct metal printed bells, and so it seems right that their design be of the newly invented Longnow Difference-tone Bell. Danny Hillis of the Longnow Foundation gave his blessing to this research using the Longnow bell design.

More recently, Lab 22 has printed a 95mm mouth diameter difference tone bell design in titanium using the Electron Beam Printer and this bell also retains the same partial frequency array as a cast bronze bell at the same scale. There are plans to print a larger titanium bell at Lab 22, and some of the small Mathematician Instrument Sculptures I designed whilst in residency at La 22. 

Although I have now completed my wonderful Synapse Residency at CSIRO I feel sure that a research relationship with them will endure. I cannot thank ANAT and CSIRO enough and of course everyone at Lab 22 Clayton for allowing me the amazing experience of working in that research environment. The residency has been inspirational for me and has enlarged my vision of what is possible in orders of magnitude I can but hope to demonstrate with my ongoing research into the history, tradition, sound and technology of bell (and sound) design in public-space. 

Synapse Residency

I am very excited to be invited to a Synapse Residency Art:Science later this year.