Biography
Richard Lerman, a sound artist, builds his practice around specially fabricated contact microphones of notably compact dimensions. He relies on strategic placement of multiple units to capture environmental acoustics that ordinarily escape human perception, evident in his sonic documentation of the Sonoran Desert. During his Milwaukee upbringing he performed on trombone and absorbed jazz, yet exposure to Darius Milhaud’s “Le Creation du Monde” prompted him to pursue independent study of modern composition while still enrolled in high school. At Brandeis College he concentrated on both film and composition, gaining experience in the electronic music studio where piezoelectric transducers first entered his technical vocabulary; his instructors included Alvin Lucier, Gordon Mumma, and mentor David Tudor. Many of his installations respond to natural forces such as wind acting on strings or tuning forks, though the core impulse remains the retrieval of otherwise inaudible events. In “Travelon Gamelon” (1977) he rendered the motion and resonances of a bicycle audible, and a recording of that piece appeared on Smithsonian Folkways in 1982. For the joint project “Threading History” he registered vibrations from barbed wire surrounding a prison camp. “A Seasonal Mapping of the Sonoran Desert” registers rainfall striking cactus spines in a manner akin to plucked strings. Active since the late 1960s, Lerman has presented his devices and related films throughout Europe and the United States, including an exhibition at MOMA. Beyond his own projects he has instructed in the arts in both Boston and Arizona.
Albums