Resonant Bodies

Resonant Bodies [an introduction]

Singing on the Line

Aliya Pabani goes to a vocal coach to look into the extent of her vocal cord damage, and the contours of the voice she has left.

Originally constructed as a four-channel audio installation, this piece played back on four speakers fabricated from four balloons. Now in online and podcast form, Singing on the Line comes to life as a close-listening stereo experience that places the listener as a fly on the wall during a singing lesson.

“This piece comes out of a desire that I've had for a long time to map out the damage to my vocal cords. As a kid, I used to scream a lot and throw a lot of tantrums and I think that might have caused stress to my vocal cords and that's why I have the voice that I have right now. And although I really like my voice, I can't actually sing very well. I have a really limited range. And so I wanted to speak to a vocal coach and do a vocal lesson to see what my voice could do.”

Credits

Singing on the Line was produced by Aliya Pabani, and features her voice alongside the voice of vocal coach and musician Kritty Uranowski.

Thing-Like

How is a business phone call like a folk song or jazz standard? How much are non-words, and part-words, involved in how we communicate? Is it possible to speak into the void; to use our voices to communicate nothing at all?

In Thing-Like, Jon Tjhia has created a suite of 'exercises' – basically analogous to piano études, or studies, for edited sound works. Taking Walter Ong's preoccupations with the 'immersive' and vital nature of oral culture as a point of departure, these pieces tease and critique the heavy burden of speech and its value: as social currency, blunt instrument, monetary resource and point of connection.

This collection of short works is composed for speakers – inviting, intrusive, implicating the passer-by; and headphones – individual, interior. Traditional interviews, aimless conversations, paid celebrity dedications, forgotten sing-alongs, free improvisations, custom voice synthesis and chance murmurs become material for a process that is both informal and entirely formal. Speakers’ words are manipulated (‘say that again, but opposite’); license agreements are breached. While Ong argues that thought and expression have been fundamentally reconfigured by the technology of writing; Thing-Like suggests ways in which voice and speech have been reconfigured by the technology of money and how it structures time.

“I’m generally interested in thinking about sound as a material and time as a material. Speech acts, and the way most examples of speaking make no sense without at least an implied listener. But the key idea which informs Thing-Like as a title and a work is Ong’s insistence on writing as a technology, and how that’s bled back into the realm of speaking. It’s not just writing that’s become standardised. And, if you think of it in certain ways, the recorded voice is very similar to the written word.”

Credits

Thing-Like, by Jon Tjhia, was adapted for stereo from a four-channel installation. It features Carolyn Connors, Ahmed Yussuf and Montell Jordan.

Hamina, Finland

“Where is the Cloud located on Earth?” Reflecting on the disembodied lexicon of virtual space, Kaija Siirala’s Hamina, Finland situates listeners at an unexpected nexus between digital and physical gathering places: the Hamina sauna. A relic of a retrofitted paper mill, this sauna is an employee perk at the Hamina Google data center in Southern Finland. Uniquely, seawater is channeled here to cool Google’s vast, active server bodies. Simultaneously, human bodies in the neighbouring sauna heat up after a day of work. The piece considers the often-obscured physical consequences of virtual activity by mapping it onto a visceral sauna experience.

A watery world emerges through a whispered choir of google search histories, including Siirala’s own Hamina sauna research. Sauna is a central component of Finnish culture and is a lifelong practice Siirala inherited from her family. Her field recordings from these times together — sounds of breath, camaraderie, eruptions of laughter — underscore the piece.

When water is tossed onto the rocks atop the stove, the löyly — steam in Finnish — mounts the heat to an intolerable crescendo forcing participants out of the sauna and into the same cold sea cooling the Google servers. Löyly shares the same etymological root as the Finnish word for “spirit”.

“I started thinking about the language that is used when talking about the digital space, the internet. And I started noticing that a lot of this language centers around these disembodied spaces. The cloud somehow implying that the digital space is somewhere out there in the ether, is in the air and doesn't have any physical on earth consequences. So I started to think about what that meant. And I started looking at, you know, where does the cloud exist on Earth? Where where is this data stored?”

Credits

Thank you to the google whisper chorus (Aaron, Alessandra, Alex, Curtis, Erin, Finn, Julia, Kalli, Marie Sarah, and Zoe; Micah Smith for sauna recording booth session, Kari Siirala for Finnish lexicon and Julien Charbonneau for his hospitality at the Lac.

Transport Station

Forests, rain, traffic — all seem to sound louder in the dark of night. For sighted people, hearing is the center point of attention only when visual input is absent or unclear. Cheldon Paterson’s Transport Station, composed as an audiovisual diptych (though is also released via podcast as audio-only) plays with this tendency through spatial isolation of the audio and visual components of the work, so that they can be experienced both together and apart.

In video form, Paterson’s audio comes first, setting up hearing as the primary mode of perceiving one’s environment. Listeners hear field recordings from urban and natural environments that have been twisted and turned on themselves through turntablism and sampling. The second half of the piece is accompanied by video, which employs the kaleidoscope as a visual metaphor for how the transformation of familiar sounds affects the imagination.

While the interaction of sight and sound is usually clarifying to the senses, Paterson’s approach refracts memory and imagination, forcing the viewer-listener to succumb to the current of sensual input or become an active participant in meaning-making.

“Transport station is the starting point of a fantastic voyage deep into your imagination. There's a wooden bench with headphones hanging above so you can wait for your ride. Sounds are constantly entering our bodies through our ears or by vibrations felt everywhere. Our brains have this amazing ability to cancel out familiar frequencies like the humming of a fan, fridge noise, and even the steady flow of highway traffic. With my installation, I wanted to examine what happens when familiar sounds are manipulated with the absence of sight as a reference and taken out of context.”

Transport Station was composed by Cheldon Paterson aka SlowPitchSound.

Protect Me From My Protector

In her critique of romantic love, bell hooks writes, “This illusion, perpetuated by so much romantic lore, stands in the way of our learning how to love. To sustain our fantasy, we substitute romance for love.” In Protect Me From My Protector, Chandra Melting Tallow pierces the fantasy of romance to reveal the sharp, tense and dark edges of harm within intimate partner relationships. Dropping us into the emotional inner world of the artist, this work explores the intensity, confusion, and disorientation of living within the confines of abuse, including the cycles of trauma and cognitive dissonance that occur when one’s protector is simultaneously inflicting harm.

The piece extends past personal relationships to confront power relations, particularly between the state as a protectorate and marginalized communities. When these communities are depicted as irrational and hysterical, the state reasserts power to remove their agency. As a result of such abuses of power, the world is heard and experienced differently by marginalized communities, so that music that once signaled romance can be recast as a tool of manipulation.

“The topic [of intimate partner violence] makes people uncomfortable. Regardless of how much people say they want to believe in support survivors, it’s still taboo. So I wanted to make something that would dismantle the isolation that survivors experience as well as people who are still in that situation.”

Protect Me From My Protector was composed by Chandra Melting Tallow.

Isn't it lovely?

Stepping inside Isn’t it lovely?, Phoebe Wang asks the audience to leave the known territory and comfort of the white-walled gallery space to become immersed in an isolated environment. Here, sights and sounds of walls, carpets, speech and din create a faux-warmth that is at once invasive and curious. The listener then must subject themselves to the sounds that enter their ears.

The fragments of recorded memories that make up Isn’t it lovely? hover over meaning, never landing solidly. As the audio progresses, Wang prompts and engages in a series of conversations that attempt to ask, “why choose to keep going in a world that is not built for you?”

In Isn’t it lovely?, Wang constructs a refuge of sorts – yet the systems and histories she seeks to evade or emancipate herself from continue to be felt here, too.

“I got into installation art is because I was really excited by the idea of surrounding people with a world that they could enter into. And the reason I was excited about sound was that sound can also go inside of you. So as an installation artist, and also a sound artist, I can create a world around you and then also have sound go inside of you. And it's the most immersive experience possible in my mind. So that's really exciting for me.”

Special thanks to Mitchell Akiyama, Sholeh Asgary, Niki Boghossian, Julia Bosson, Henry Faber, Grace Finlayson, Sarah Geis, Sarah Hallacher, Anne Sofie Kluge Hedegaard, Monique Ligons, Michelle Macklem, Aliya Pabani, Heather Raquel Phillips, Jenelle Pifer, Bird Reynolds, Lydia Rosenberg, Robin Luckwaldt Ross, Jess Shane, Siel Timperman, Mitch Trachter, Andrew Verlander.

This work was supported in part by the Wassaic Artist Residency Program, and commissioned for Resonant Bodies by Constellations.

RESONANT BODIES [the exhibition]