Portland Design Week Amplifier: A Multi-Sensory Tasting Experiment

Sound Art

Amplifier was a multisensory tasting event, cross-pollinating Portland’s all-star mixologists with sound and visual designers. The event was held at the Jupiter Next Hotel Thursday April 11th, 2019 during Design Week Portland, and invited attendees to select a ticket from thirty minute time slots, allowing them to be guided through sensory immersion rooms in small groups of ten.

Curators Ethan Rose of Parallel Studio, Blake Shell of Disjecta, and Marilee Sweeney of Gastronaut Design matched up three teams of a mixologist, a sound designer, and a visual artist. They asked these teams to explore how sound and visual design can be used to amplify the experience of taste and deepen sensory experience as a whole. The nine collaborators dove into experiential design together, creating three distinct sensory immersion rooms wrapped around a featured cocktail.

For the first team collaboration meeting, Emily Mistell of Hey Love, Jeffrey Morgenthaler of Clyde Common, and Leah Brown of Angel Face created a cocktail for their teams to taste, with the only restriction that they work with an Oregon distillery. The sound artists and visual artists were then asked to create environments that respond to the taste of the cocktail they were presented. 

Through dense layers of celesta, organ, Rhodes piano, voice, violin, woodwinds, synthesized pulses, field recordings (deep ocean, thunder and crickets), wood scraps, ceramic cups, pops, clicks, branches and leaves, I designed a piece focused on richness, texture and complexity. The blooming layers are meant to support and reflect the cocktail created by Leah Brown and the visual work of Manu Torres.