The stereo store
I grew up in my grandpa’s stereo store on SE Hawthorne, still there today, repairing speakers and watching the needles on records turn tiny vibrations into big sound.
About
Hi, I’m Rob.
I’ve been a Portland photographer for 20+ years, and I’ve been listening to sound and vibration my whole life.
The story behind the sound
A life full of vibration
The dance studio
My mom and grandma had a dance studio in Portland. That’s where I first felt sound as expression and as art: the music, the rhythm, the flow.
The didgeridoo
Since my early teens I’ve played the didgeridoo, making my own vibrations and sending them through the earth and the air.
The didgeridoo comes from Aboriginal Australians, who have played it for generations, and I’m grateful to be a lifelong student of it.
The camera
I’ve run RobProPhoto since 2006. These days I work with local businesses, and with local artists on art reproduction. My side project: pointing a macro camera at sound.
The vision
Macro photography, but with sound
I capture tiny sounds and bring them up to life size. And I film them too: my macro camera makes the world look big, so the picture is as close as the sound.
Tiny sounds we walk past every day, turned up until they sing.
This whole project is a search for the perfect tiny sound. It’s exploration, learning, and discovery. That sound could be hiding anywhere in everyday life: fingertips tapping a table, a pencil scratching across paper, a book dropped on a table, a wooden bench creaking as someone slides along it.
Every one of these everyday things is unique in its own way. Take a pencil on paper. The tiniest sound it makes depends on the grain of the paper, the thickness of the paper and the book, the sharpness of the pencil, where you place your hand, how hard you press, and how you lift the pencil off between strokes. Then there’s what the paper is sitting on. A metal table or a wooden one? How does the table affect the resonance? Does the table make sounds too, from its grain and the way it’s built? I could go on and on. Our everyday things are one of a kind, impossible to reproduce. There’s always something new to hear.
Where it’s going
Everything around us has its own resonance, its own frequencies. Part of this project is finding those hidden resonances and letting them become my sound art, my library for recreating film and video sounds, and a way to explore sound healing. I capture these everyday frequencies and turn them up, hoping the work helps people notice the small sounds in ordinary life a little more, and maybe hear them from a completely different perspective.
That’s why I need volunteers. Everyone sounds different: the way you tap, swirl or slide is your own, so every session brings something new. Depending on the sound that inspires me at the moment, I’ll ask you to help me search for it.
How I work
I want to be 100% open and honest about what we’re doing, so nobody is ever surprised at the table. Before we meet, you choose whether you appear in the video, and you can say “skip” anytime. The one-page release spells out how the recordings are used, and you can read it before you come.
Make some tiny sounds with me
About an hour at a Portland café. Your latte, matcha, or pastry is on me.
Count Me In