THE RESONANT BODIES initiate resonance by producing tone (mechanical resonance) and embodying a multidisciplinary process (cultural resonance), bridging sonic and spatial disciplines. The design criteria that define the resonant bodies and the sounds they make are developed in tandem with compositional ideas, where they play a crucial role in aligning musical intentions with physical realities. By integrating modal frequency analysis with evolutionary solvers, the geometry and material composition of these pieces have been optimised according to a set of musically-driven design criteria. Each resonant body is fabricated and fine-tuned using advanced digital manufacturing techniques, such as 3D printing for creating lost wax positives, 3D scanning, and CNC milling. These processes not only refine the pieces but also address any discrepancies between the digital models and the final physical objects From their design through manufacture, composition, performance, and listening, these instruments exemplify resonances between the diverse architectural and musical tools, methodologies, and theories involved in their creation. The design process for the resonant bodies involves both intuitive and calculative methods. The study of other fork and bell-like structures, such as those created by composer Harry Partch, empirically informs decisions about the initial geometry and materiality of the Resonant Bodies. They are then digitally modelled, and their modal frequencies simulated using tools that are typically used to design resonance out of architectural structures. The primary role of the Resonant Bodies in developing spatiosonic projects is to function as audibly tangible reminders of key timbral and harmonic structures in compositional works. They are not site-specific like the compositions and performances that they facilitate. However, they do help to fine-tune the work both intellectually and practically in that they mediate between states of things — not only between the apparatus and practices used in architecture and music, but also between percussive and pitch-based sounds, and sensory thresholds between hearing and feeling. Their polyphony plays a crucial role in calibrating the dissonant musical intervals of the minor second and minor ninth. Physicist Herman Helmholtz considered these to be the ‘roughest’ or most dissonant musical intervals in tempered tuning. Dissonance plays a key role in many of the spatiosonic compositions in this research. The proximity of partials in dissonant tonal combinations, even at very low frequencies, results in a beat pattern. This beat pattern is an oscillation in volume level, produced by alternating instances of constructive and destructive interference when two similar tones play at the same time. In this work, beat patterns are utilised as a rhythmic device, intended to illustrate concepts of motion or perpetual change and discuss an important threshold between listening and hearing. Additional temporal instability is introduced when a played rhythm is superimposed onto beat patterns. The polyphony of both the fork-like and bell-like Resonant Bodies is designed to create this tonal interference, serving as a tool to calibrate the compositions that capitalise on this phenomenon.

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