page_title: Margaret Noble (artist)
section_title: Sound art and installations (2012-present)
hierarchical_section_title: Margaret Noble (artist) / Career / Sound art and installations (2012-present)
caption_attribution_description: English: Interactive sound sculpture by Margaret Noble.
context_page_description: Margaret Noble is an American conceptual artist, sound artist, installation artist, teacher and electronic music composer.
context_section_description: Noble's installation 44th and Landis opened in 2012 at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. The large-scale multimedia art piece combined Victorian-style paper dolls with 1980s urban influences based on her upbringing in San Diego's City Heights neighborhood, and included a performance by Noble. The show's visual centerpiece was a hanging series of 100 paper dolls, along with paper-doll clothing, objects and architecture. 
  In her 2016 interactive piece "What Lies Beneath", she worked in sound sculpture, creating a tall wooden box with instructions next to it to raise the lid, which caused sounds of organ pipes, truck brakes and other dissonance to emit. The person interacting with it controlled the sound with the lid, with a "storm" inside the box.
  Her "Head in the Sand" is a wooden box sitting on four legs with a head-sized hole in the top and instructions to visitors to place their heads in the hole and wait. Inside is a chambered light and sound show with soft pastoral sounds, the hole serving as a sanctuary from the art exhibit itself. "Head in the Sand" was included in her 2016 exhibition Resonating Object, an interactive mixture of sound, sculpture and videos, at South Puget Sound Community College in Olympia, Washington. The exhibition also included "I Long to Be Free From Longing" and "Material Shrine for the New Class", featuring dangling objects the visitor could squeeze to activate different sounds. Her 2014 interactive sound installation "I Long to Be Free From Longing" won first place in the 23rd annual Juried Exhibition at the Athenaeum Music & Arts Library in San Diego.
  Noble's 2016 sound art installation Time Strata, a public art commission for the Port of San Diego at the Cesar Chavez Park pier, consisted of three sound sculptures made of materials including vintage buoys, hunks of bamboo, bells, stainless steel and harp strings, along with sounds of creatures like snapping shrimp in the water under the pier. Microphones placed around the pier fed the sound into a mixer and then into four digital consoles where participants could sample and alter the sounds.
  For The Collector, Noble worked with puppeteers Animal Cracker Conspiracy and visual directors Bridget Rountree and Iain Gunn, creating a multi-layered soundscape that used animated video, live video projection and puppetry to tell a story of a debt collector. Righteous Exploits, a 2013 experimental performance created with Justin Hudnall, used a combination of live audio and video multimedia and performance art.
  Her 2018 installations of Resonating Objects included "lawn sprinklers sitting on grass-covered pedestals, playing their percussive, shimmering, water-spraying sounds", entitled "I Have Arrived", which explores the use of expendable resources on lawns, or status symbols.
  Two other pieces are "Scaled Discords, 2015", with spinning tops representing "power structures, resource allocation and racial inequality in America", and "A Shit Pile of Lights and Sounds for Your Pleasure" consisting of "mash-up of Lite Brite, a Ouija board, and an early Akai sampler".
caption: What Lies Beneath, by Margaret Noble
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