Tilde—Cast (Dowsing) is an interactive work for six oscillators and radio that invites the listener to participate through tuning and acoustic filtering. The piece is a live radio broadcast performance of overtone and beating pattern phenomena within multi-oscillator and multi-pitch frequency modulations, regulated by nuanced pitch manipulations within commingling square waves and volume control, that shows how particular spaces and materials shape radio’s characteristics.

Proximity is important to Tilde—Cast (Dowsing): Cook invites the remote listener to sit near the speakers, hold the tune knob, and modulate at will. The primary reason for this invitation is to encourage the audience to focus on close listening and the intimacy of being physically contiguous to the radio while listening to the broadcast. This introduces a personal and spontaneous participatory aspect to the work. Tuning the radio was something Cook used to do when he was young, which recalls for him evocative memories of the intensity of being close to the speaker. For Cook, the setting of being alone in a quiet room added to the drama of that experience.


Tilde—Cast (Dowsing) is also a study of the gradations of atmospheric radio signal frequency inflections. The remote listener will also be invited to introduce acoustic filtering to muffle, attenuate, and augment the broadcast by draping fabric or other materials over and against their own speakers. A vase or glass, for instance, can be used to reflect the sound creating a micro-chamber effect and acoustical scale shift.


The work investigates how the act of broadcasting is a dissemination of content without knowing where it will go, who will hear it, or what will become of it, though is deeply influenced by the environment in which it arrives. Since broadcast content intermingles within unique spheres which morph its identity, Cook invites this process into Tilde—Cast (Dowsing) by encouraging listener-generated manipulation of the transmission. The work is ultimately a meditation on the variability and mutability of diffusion and also the ways in which our perception and enjoyment of sound is heavily influenced by atmospheric and environmental particulars. Reprinted from Radius.