Eric Parks Seashell Speakers

January 3, 1992

Sculptuor Turned Musician uses Sea Shell Designs to Sculpt Sound
by Russ McKinney

Every child who has ever strolled along a beach has put a shell up to his ear to hear the sound of the sea. Eric Parks, a well-known local sculptor turned musician, has combined this common experience with his own artistic serendipity and a healthy dose of Yankee ingenuity. He has developed sound system speakers modeled on the Chambered Nautilus.Down-playing his innovation with characteristic modesty, Parks says, "the concept is not really new. It's part of music. I've just managed to intuitively connect ancient knowledge with modern technology."

In fact, the process has taken Parks four years. Initially, he says, "I had several shells, and I ground the ends off and resined in a pair of earphones. The sound blew me away." Parks eventually decided to make full-size speakers instead of earphones. Following a shell-hunting expedition to the Florida Keys, he began working full-time on the concept. It took him five months to produce the first prototypes.

Using the three-dimensional enlarging machines that enable sculptors to accurately scale up an object, he first produced a clay model three times larger than the Chambered Nautilus. The shells are cast in interlocking segments made of fiberglass. Once the speaker mechanisms are added, the shells are ready to be plugged in and played. While most speakers are simple boxes, Parks' speakers look like relics of giant prehistoric sea creatures. There is no membrane or covering over the opening. A performer flanked by an array of the speakers produces an amazing new look, but the look of the speakers is only part of the story.

Inside, where the sound is produced, the speakers are also shaped like the shells that inspired them. The resulting quality of the sound they produce is the critical issue, and that is where Parks' design really shines.

"The sound has a purity and a clarity that is extraordinary. There is something happening here," says Parks. When he demonstrated the speakers to Dale Irwin of Balance Sound in New Castle, a professional sound system designer, "he basically flipped," says Parks. What began as a chance meeting of the two men soon turned into a collaboration."Dale has spec'ed all the transducers. He's a technical wizard. He's been doing it for 20 years," says Parks. He points out that as unusual as the shells may be visually, "they are commercial grade colaxial speakers."

At one of the first public demonstrations of the speakers, a conference on music and healing held at Immaculata College, Parks says the audience's reactions included comments like "it sounded like the sound system disappeared. The whole stage became the cello."

Apparently, the idea of sculpting sound is not the contradiction in terms that it appears to be at first glance. Most sculpture is made of firmer stuff than sound waves. However, to Eric Parks, his idea represents a paradigm of nature and art. Artists have used the "golden spiral" or the "divine proportion" as a guide to image composition for centuries. The musical stave and the tuning heads on cellos and violins are double spirals, and the form is found in nature - in everything from the shape of the inner ear to the spiral forms of hurricanes and galaxies.

For Parks this cosmic connection is not superfluous. He points out, for example, that medieval cathedrals are really "acoustic healing chambers" and his travels around the world helped him to become aware of a common thread in all types of sacred music - despite the superficial differences between Indian mantras and gospel music. He also credits a dolphin, with whom he had a close encounter while scuba diving off the Florida Keys, with helping him to realize how nature is full of miraculous combinations of form and function. In effect, Parks says the spiral wave form of the speakers "helps the transducers to get back to a natural sound wave."

One of the results is technically known as acoustic coupling - the amount of sound needed to fill a given room. The shell-shaped speakers can fill a room using less sound than conventional speakers, and "the sound doesn't die in the corners," he says.

While the samples he has produced thus far are mounted on short pedestals, Parks is working on the idea of suspending the speakers from the ceiling. He also is continuing to experiment with different types of shells. He says the Chambered Nautilus shells are best at the low and mid-range, while a speaker shaped like a particular type of Australian mollusk produces the best high range sounds. However, the next major hurdle in the project for Parks is determining how to bring the speakers to the home sound system market as well as the concert stage market.

Given the challenges involved in interesting a major electronics firm in manufacturing the speakers, Parks is not sure when they will become commercially available. Meanwhile, [back in 1992] interested listeners can hear the speakers and their inventor at the Crossroads Cafe on the Concord Pike side of the Talleyville Shopping Center. Parks plays there on Saturdays from 5:00 pm to 8:00 pm. A composer as well as a performer, Parks sings and accompanies himself on the classical guitar.

"I like the dinner hour," says Parks, "because there are kids, and someone is always listening." Although Parks says, "I've been playing music since I was a child," perhaps, in part, because of his having a track record as a sculptor that many in the field would envy, he does say that it has taken him a long time to realize the strength of his interest in music. Earlier indications of that interest include his ten-foot-high statue of Elvis Presley in Memphis and his "American Song, " a seven foot bronze statue of a flute player that stands in Independence Mall in Philadelphia.