Australian Music Centre | Breaking sound barriers

Work Overview

The acoustic material for this work comprises recordings of historical and contemporary music machines from Australia, Germany and Hungary, for example a Talking Machine invented by a British artist living in Berlin, Martin Riches. In addition I use acoustic recordings of the natural environment in Australia and Europe, together with an earlier composition entitled ' ffffff...' which was directly inspired by Riches' flute-playing machine and by the sound of nature.

Through the connection of certain natural and environmental sounds a continually changing landscape is created, accentuated by machine-like sounds such as Percy's Laundry Organ, a sighing organ machine invented by Australin artist Rodney Berry. The sound material is distributed over several channels, the natural sounds occupying a broad acoustic space whilst machines and flutes appear from more specific areas. Almost all the machines are reproduced over a mono loudspeaker. The flute parts are distributed over the foreground and background acoustic spaces. A dialogue takes place through the way in which all of these complementary sounds influence each other within the field of listening. It's not about a narrative sequence of events, but events happening at the same time - in short 'parallel' worlds.

Work Details

Year: 1999

Instrumentation: For live diffusion 8 surround speakers would be required.

Duration: 30 min.

Difficulty: N/A - Not for live performance

Commission note: WDR Studio Acoustic Art/ABC Radio Art Sydney

First performance: 15 Jan 00. West German Radio electronic studios, Germany.

This work received the Karl Szucka Prize awarded by SWR for radiophonic work in 2000.