Watching the clock, waking to an alarm, waiting for the phone to ring, waiting for your call to be answered, refusing to answer the phone. All of these moments of suspension and discontinuity have a kind of Pavlovian force. Our response to these stimuli is not cerebral, it is spinal.

The dial tones, ring, and busy singals of the world's telephone systems comprise an odd collection of simple musical gestures, immediately and inescapably recognizable to some and confusing to others. For example, the charming 10/8 pattern of the Italian dial tone can be disconcerting to someone used to the droning dial tones of the rest of the world. The frequencies of the North American phone tones (350, 440, 480, 620 Hz) spell out a pleasingly exotic scale with a quarter tone sharp fourth and a very flat seventh. The transition from a peaceful Javanese pelog to an irritating busy signal occurs the instant two tones are pulsed together at a steady 120 times a second. One final oddity - in the movies, a dialtone appears whenever one person hangs up on another. In life, dialtones are harder to come by.

Outgoing Message uses forty telephones and eight channels of sound synthesized to the exacting standards of the world's best telephone systems to explore the transition zone between sounds and commands.

Ron Kuivila composes music and designs sound installations that revolve around the homemade and home modified electronic systems he designs. He pioneered the use of ultrasound (Comparing Habits) and sound sampling (Alphabet) in live performance. Other pieces have explored compositional algorithms (Loose Canons), speech synthesis (The Linear Predictive Zoo), and high voltage phenomena (Pythagorean Puppet Theatre). Most recently, he completed the first installment of Visitations, a sound installation that reconstructs the past soundscapes of the factories that used to exist on the campus of the newly opened Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.

Kuivila has performed and exhibited throughout the U.S., Canada, and Europe. Recent projects have included commissions from MASS MoCA, the ZKM, Singuhr Galerie, Berlin, and V2, Rotterdam, The Netherlands. He is on the faculty of the Music Department at Wesleyan University.

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