in_between (2023)
Octophonic sound installation. SpokenWeb and Sound Studies Institute Artistic Residency @ University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada. May 1st - May 12th.
SpokenWeb symposium website:
https://app.groupize.com/e/spokenweb-2023-symposium#speakers_section_222387
Description:
in_between is a sound installation exploring what lies beneath reverberation, echo and resonance, both in their acoustic and semiotic expressions. From the original sound source to the reflected signal, often reduced to either a unique and indiscernible flow or to discrete and separated events, it deals with what happens in-between. What is the liminality of those sound events? A difference in repetition, a lapse in between reflections? The time to take and make place. It is an in-between that enhances, repeats, but also one that can disrupt and reduce meanings. At once an addition to sonic flows, and a loss of information, of clarity.
In this installation, reverberation, echo and resonance will be understood in the midst of practices of (re-) defining “affective spacetimes” (McCormack, 2013) as making place, from the physical properties of a given room to the symbolic dualities of the ones able to speak, and the ones kept silent. From the voice as sound event, to the word as meaning, it becomes a question of individuation processes, a movement between smooth and striated spaces, ritournelles in-between bodies, listening underneath (Bonnet, 2019). As part of the SpokenWeb artistic residency, it is also a reflection about the practice itself, within DSC’s Makerspace: a particular process, in a particular spacetime, populated with its own echoes, reverberations, and rhythms.
The sounds of this installation exclusively originate from voices, either coming from a live “text-to-speech” processing and recording during parts of the installation, or from a polyphony of voices recorded beforehand at the University of Alberta, during the residency.
The voices are: Angelika Gabauer, Nicholas Hardy, Paulina Johnson, Jim Morrow, Juan Guevara Salamanca, Pradeep Sangapala.