sound
The Past is the Future
We experience time as flowing towards an uncertain future. we experience memories as belonging to our past. we experience the present as universal. but there is no single present: time dilates with speed and gravity. our future is stained by memory. laws of physics don’t care which direction time travels. feel yourself moving through the intertwined dimension of time and space. once a marvel of invention, the plucked strings of the harpsichord transport today’s listeners centuries into the past. find yourself in a universe where the past, present and future exist simultaneously. we perceive time as moving from past to future in a line. similarly, musical works unfold from beginning to end. yet, we are surrounded by cycles (the moon, the sun, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, water). this work is constructed from cycles which are arranged symmetrically and inform each other. the 12 pitches of the western scale are used like hours on a clock in two configurations - as a unique series and in fifths. the order never deviates, but new groupings emerge as geometric shapes within every cycle. both series are mapped onto each other, their traces creating new series. the harmonic material of every bar is intrinsically linked as cycles of geometric shapes appear as part of an overarching sinusoid.
Chronophone
Countless hours of spoken English are echoed by artificial voices mimicking the sounds of a century-old clock and recordings of prehistoric musical instruments. A generative AI model’s experience of the present is intertwined with a remembering of the past (through datasets) and invoking of the future (through prediction). A future conjured from the sounds of time passing and time passed. Recordings of rocks, bone flutes and ram’s horns are transformed from the time-domain to the frequency-domain, their unique spectra dissected and resynthesized by hundreds of oscillators. Stripped of time and place yet situated. Find yourself moving through space and time. Find the entanglements of the past, present and future punctuated by trace. Are time and space inseparable?
Herbert's Dream
Imagine new conceptions of the body that transcend Cartesian dualism; humans as physical bodies and immaterial minds. Could the notion of a body be extended to bodies of knowledge used by machine learning algorithms? Unruliness and familiarity in deep learning timbre transfer tools create a sound world of surreal, disjointed narratives that are also emotionally intimate. A fever dream for the listener, sound to recreate those strange worlds we encounter in our sleep. Strange and beautifully noisy, a voice audibly struggling to make sense of and replicate audio information outside its training data.
Rules For Pedestrians
By travelling on foot we embody a pulse. With our feet, our hands, our eyes - we sense in twos. Cars driving parallel slide to stretches of noise and obscure our dance. Architecture forms rhythm in stasis. In every body's heartbeat a groove.
i forgot to turn off the sprinkler
Water is applied to flora in a controlled manner. A common lawn device enacts an irrigation ritual of necessity and excess. Rainfall is conjured. The morphology of these sprinkler sounds, like the sprinkler itself, indulges us with a space to explore notions of the essential and the abundant, what it means to need and to need not exist.
BOBA
CROFFLE! (3'48")
CHEESE FOAM (2'30")
FISH~DUCK~HUMAN (4'08")
Orbs of cassava are suspended in a blend of the white liquid food of mammaliaforms, an extraction of Camellia sinensis leaves, and the sweet-tasting carbohydrates in plant tissue. But all I can think about is whether I will successfully puncture the plastic film of this drink I paid too much for.
ANASTOMOSING
Anastomosis is the connection of two normally divergent things. ‘Anastamosing’ is the first in a series of works that encourage the sensing of a changing climate by fostering sensorial, embodied knowledge-making. Hydrophonic recordings of the Nieuwe Maas river are manipulated to activate public listening and promote kinaesthetic urbanity.
GUT
for string duo (7'00") This work was part of my masters research into the use of speech sounds in my compositional practice. I was very much inspired by the embodied knowledge gained in transcribing and interpreting a baby crying, and sought to explore the many subtle musical elements - glissandi and vibrati, development of limited pitch material - that operate in this basic form of expression. Rather than sketch a piece that was strictly programmatic (that is, meant to resemble a baby’s cry as closely as possible) I also sought to incorporate more abstract elements.
LINGUA FRANCA
for tape (7'25") I imagined the soundscape of the origins of language as a primordial ooze of utterances. I wanted to play with this notion, detaching words from their syntactic meaning and utilising language/s as a universal library of physical gestures.
WE ARE TIME
for tape (6'00") Music unfolds in time. Rhythms divide the flow of time into the audible and inaudible, the long and the short, the stressed and the unstressed. “We Are Time” builds a soundscape detached from time’s arrow. I’ve used sounds recorded at Rotterdam Centraal as a space inextricably linked to time. The station is a space of waiting, scheduling. Trains are on time. People run out of time. In creating the materials for this work, I liberated the sounds in the field recording from the time- domain through phase vocoding. The new fabric of space and time woven by these sounds invites the listener to discover new ways of listening to their environment, re-imagine the acoustic ecologies of their life, explore the link between themselves and their environment with sound as a mediator. This piece was commissioned by EUC as part of their Universe in You radio program/sound walk, which aired on Radio Worm.
AH!
for tape (7'21") The listener is encouraged to access and experience AH! where its materials were recorded (Albert Heijn) as an augmentation of the acoustic ecology of the supermarket. I explore sound as a conditioned stimulus, with certain sounds (such as the notification that an item is on "Bonus") eliciting an emotional response in the shopper that I can exploit and subvertThis piece was created as part of Josue Amador’s A Different Soundscape project out of sounds from an Albert Heijn in Rotterdam (processed in Max/MSP).
HAAAM
for tape (8'20") Inspired by the increasingly difficult task of distinguishing human voices from synthesised ones after a phone call with a customer service bot. I began to think if it even mattered, and what this meant for the imagined futures of society and of art. Sounds are designed to recreate the attack of a tongue, the depth of guttural speech sounds, the instability of sung notes all in an effort to explore the space between the natural and the unnatural.
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU DON'T
for chamber orchestra (7'14") I was inspired to navigate my experiences with bipolar disorder, which I was diagnosed with more than a decade ago. After an upsetting interaction with my dentist where he asked if I’m out in the streets violently attacking the public when I don’t take the medication I wanted to explore the space between extremes, the notion of active disengagement, emotional activity and passivity.