Touching the Audience (original) (raw)
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Text and Performance Quarterly, 2022
This research focuses on the invisible space built by sound as subject of study, developing through a practice-based methodology a creative process during a residency period in the Spatial Sound Institute (SSI), mainly to investigate the sound features of non-existing architectures. The process ended with a performance that invited listeners to experience a deeper awareness of perception for reaching spaces that exceed the limits of physical possibilities. In this sense, active listening becomes fundamental, not only for forming a personal interpretation of this expanded reality, but for creating soundspaces from a performative experience.
2018
This research project has explored the relationship between sound and sculpture, looking particularly at how sound can become sculptural. A sound sculpture is defined in this project as a sound-only entity, which explicitly extends sound’s physical and spatial aspects to take on the role of a physical, visual sculpture. In this research, this is achieved by the use of otoacoustic emissions. There is a lack of music and sound art material that actively intends to utilise the creative potential of otoacoustic emissions. This portfolio of works explores the bodily sensation of otoacoustic emissions and importantly, the agency the audience/listener has on changing their own perception and experience of the sound through their movement choices around an installation space. This novel application of otoacoustic emissions is what the author terms ‘otokinetic shaping’. This goes beyond that of the visual sculptural paradigm by introducing an element of audience participation and control. Th...
Eva Esteve, John Griffiths y Francisco Rodilla (eds.). Historical Resonances: Space, Senses and Early Music. Leiden: Brill, pp. XXI-XLV, 2025
Two of the most interesting approaches of recent academic trends, because of their interrelationship, their practical application, and their evocative potential, are the exploration of the physical environment in which these recovered repertoires were once performed, and the way they may have affected the perceptions of the listeners who bore witness to them. The difference found by contemporary audiences when comparing the listening experience in modern concert halls with performances in old buildings for which the music was originally conceived is one of the contemporary realities that has promoted this area of study to flourish. The current interest in the spatial context is not limited to identifying the specific places where musical performance took place –cathedrals, monasteries, palaces– but extends to their topography, acoustic conditions, the sensory experience of the spectator, and the awareness of this at the time. The development and interconnection of these aspects (spatial, acoustic and sensory) is the main focus of the present volume.
ACTES PROCEEDINGS, 2000
Many different spaces coexist and interconnect for any listener to music played over speakers or other means where there is no visible source of the sound. These spaces could include the physical space of the concert hall, a representation of space conceived in the perceived knowledge of the social practice of people getting together to listen to music in groups; the social space of the listeners; the virtual space of the piece of acousmatic music; the representation of perceived, conceived or lived space in the piece; as well as the representational space of the sound work and the mental space the individual listener inhabits while listening, a space that is possibly unique to sonic experience. In this paper I shall discuss how these spaces are produced and coexist; how our embodied experiences of space can be used to produce new means of representation and new forms of expression through the production of space in sound works; and investigate spatial mimesis as a new area of discourse in sonic art.
Sound installation: Blurring the boundaries of the Eye, the Ear, Space and Time
Contemporary Music Review, 2006
Sound installation interfaces musical and visual art through time and space. It is a sonic intermedia practice, which blurs the boundaries of the visual and aural and includes the spatial, the temporal and the haptic. Since 1977 I have been designing sound installations that merge the senses, offering unique experiences for the listener as participating auditor. In the discussion of several of these works the conceptual considerations in the design of cross-disciplinary works are addressed. These include the parameters derived from the disciplines of sculpture, sound, temporal composition, spatial architecture and audience interactivity. Some works merge many interdisciplinary elements such as sculptural forms, video, photography, radio and performance as well as sound, while others may appear almost invisible. The degree of musical composition and sound design features vary from work to work. Sound installations are rarely static, having many possible outcomes and many works have a high degree of immersive and interactive characteristics. As such they are difficult to document. This article will look at representative examples of my sound installations since 1977 showing diverse approaches to sound installation. It is a potent artform, which has stretched the boundaries of the disciplines of fine art and music, merging sound, time and space in new ways.
One of the newer tendencies in contemporary sound art is the use of scientific modes of data collection through laboratory set ups or field recordings, as it is for instance seen in media artist Anne Niemetz' and nano-scientist Andrew Pelling's The Dark Side of the Cell (2004) or Katie Egan and Joe Davies Audio Microscope (2000). This article tries to describe how the sound experience is conditioned by such art projects. The main argument in the article is that in such art projects we are not just experiencing ‘the world’, ‘the sound’, ‘the technology’ or ‘the listening’ but the mediating gesture happening between these positions. In order to describe this complex mediating operation the article uses a variety of media and intermedial theory particularly Lars Elleströms (Elleström, 2010) distinctions between qualified, basic and technical media. The latter is used to describe how the intermediality of such sound art projects is not just between conventional medias of art – as for instance text and sound – but between very different media aspects such as “sound” and “microphone” and “art”. On behalf of such an analysis the article claims that these art projects can be seen as an articulation of an auditory turn, in which sound no longer appears to be a transparent channel between us and the world, but rather a media conditioning that which is experienced.
A Performative Investigation of the Agency of Sound: Mapping the Sound/ Soundscape Portrait
ADSJ Australasia Drama Studies Journal, Issue 79, 2021
In this article, I discuss Mapping the Sound/Soundscape Portrait (206, 2018), an audience-participatory, synaesthetic sound/drawing live performance. I perform my synaesthesia: sitting on a large piece of paper, I draw the sounds that I hear as I “see” them with the eyes of my mind, and I move accordingly— if sound is a place (soundscape), what does it look like? Conceiving sound as a performative element with agency, Mapping invites those involved to pay attention to the liveness of the soundscape in which they are immersed and their relationship with it. This work questions the sight-hegemonic and purpose-oriented human experience of place by centralising the presence and presentness of sound as the key-element of narrative-making and knowledge production. The agency of the audience and of sound in the performance de-centralises the artist, who ceases to be the protagonist of the work and becomes a vehicle for its process to unfold. The performance offers a new sensorial perspective on the surrounding environment to those involved, contributing to the scholarship studying the role of live art and embodied practices as tools in investigating the world.
Embodied Sound: Aural Architectures and the Body
Contemporary Music Review, 2006
This article examines two sound installations distributed on CD: Maryanne Amacher’s Sound Characters (Making the Third Ear) (1999) and Bernhard Leitner’s KOPFRAUME (HEADSCAPES) (2003). The author undertakes an embodied reception of these works, experimenting with new models of listening and analysis that take into consideration aspects of the built environment, social spaces and imaginary architectures as these are perceived at the intersection of sound, space and the body. Conceptualizations of space, place and embodiment are engaged; and definitions for sound installation and ‘situated sonic practices’ are offered. The analysis ultimately reveals how the complex, dynamic networks of sound, space, place and embodiment can be understood to produce and constitute one another.
This article reappraises and develops Marshall McLuhan’s theory of ‘Auditory Space’ as a critical tool for interrogating emergent, immersive modes of new media performance. Commonalities in the practise of Erwin Piscator, Steve Reich and Beryl Korot are explored, specifically in their respective applications of technology as a means by which to re-present historical events and document lived experiences with political intent. Contemporary views on historiography and historicity are explored and contextualised with respect to postmodern theory. A performance of Steve Reich and Beryl Korot’s Three Tales is analysed, in the light ‘auditory space’, with reference to ways in which Three Tales evoke collective memory, to raise political concerns and issues of authenticity and to affect the spectator. Each of these practitioners use contemporaneous technologies to communicate to audiences of their day in ways that suit the tenor and technological environment of their times. These notions are briefly discussed from a historical perspective in relation to theatrical stagings that operate different approaches to illusion or anti-illusion. I draw on Jacques Derrida’s theories of deconstruction and his critique of Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty. The affective potential of music is assessed using phenomenology as a means through which to describe perceptual modes encountered in multi-channelled performance.