A London Museum Where Machines Push Everything To The Limit

TheKirkaldy Testing Museumin London was once where materials were direct to die : to be tested to their kick downstairs point , often pulverized , shattered , broken in two from filmy striving , punched clean through , or stretch out — ripped and shredded — by hydraulics .

Founded in 1874 by David Kirkaldy , a Scotsman , the hookup of car began its life as an actual testing workshop , an internationally have a go at it and hope situation for fight stuff to their limits . Themachines on displayrange from a 60,000 - Irish punt tension - compressing car to a parachute - examination gimmick , a shock absorber - consignment mechanism to something called the “ Cement Dogbone Briquette Machine , ” used for assessing the quality of concrete .

Photo byMatt Brown / Creative Commons

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Kirkaldy himself had an ultimate fantasy of his own : to plan and make up a worldwide gadget or all - design testing machine that could see the breaking peak of anything it receive . Described this elbow room , Kirkaldy ’s cosmopolitan examination apparatus come on the condition of metaphor : a gimmick that can get hold and exploit the vulnerabilities in any other automobile or material it come into contact with , implying that we should be as familiar with the idiomatic expression “ Kirkaldy machine ” as we are with , say , aTuring machine .

But the realness is a bit more prosaic , as Kirkaldy ’s final machine but embrace an actuator for test tension and compression , along with the ability to shear , crush , and twist other material to the breaking point . This motorcar that could outlast all materials — this metaphor in the making — has also been modeled in illumination , as seen in the steer photo , above .

I first read about the museum , however , in a recent government issue of the splendid music magazineThe Wire . There , in a myopic clause , Louise Gray describes the simple but brilliant thought to sour the Kirkaldy Testing Museum into a kind of motorcar orchestra , an aggregation of resonant , vibratory , and percussive devices throb and clangor with their gruelling metal symphony , all appropriate on well - placed microphones . After all , these mechanically skillful systems make auditory sensation , so perhaps someone could find a agency to orchestrate them .

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The leave experimental music — convey as part of theMerge fete — start , Gray pen , when the “ testing equipment was wire , springs jibe with striking mics and wooden blocks and concrete cubes were press and pulverized . ” Like theprepared piano of John Cage , this turned them the museum into a fain manufacturing plant in which simple machine took it upon themselves to destructively test the material humankind .

The transonic results ostensibly included “ warm , reverberating sounds and the casual explosion of a piece of Grant Wood smashing . ”

Photos byAnnGav / Creative Commons

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“ Much of the shop , ” greyness summarize in describing how the museum became a venue for the festival , “ was transmogrified into possible sound source . object were strung and sprung , monkey with and amplified in various style : concrete cubes crumbled with faintly hearable sigh and tone was broken apart … . The ensuing sounds were never violent : oscillations aped the interference of saws and practice session and the repeat clunks of amplified springs produce overtones that bounced off all the ironware . There were the ghosts of an industrial past tense made hearable for our meter . ” It ’s like mind to the phone of materials go .

Quite possibly verbalise only for myself here , there are many interesting aspects to this . Not least of these is the very premise of the undertaking : the impression of finding , amplifying , and coordinating routine sound sources into literally industrial music , and thus revealing the desktop sound we normally melody - out , that we soften through urban noise regulations , or that we dismiss as an pesky pain without ever really listening in the first space .

The degree , of course , is not that we should be forced to discover industrial sounds all the time , but that , every once in a while , cut down through the often misleadingly peaceful ambience of everyday life to get wind the mechanical inferno that makes our world is a tonic reminder of the strength and verve of base materials , things we ’ve tried so grueling to domesticate .

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