Why did you choose to use sound as a physical material in your art?
I don’t think I chose sound but that it sort of chose me. I’ve always felt a little synesthetic in terms of sound. I ‘feel or see’ it spatially in my mind’s eye. When I imagine a piece I almost ‘see’ the sound moving around the space as a physical construction. Sound to me is very sculptural.
Is there one piece of music that had a particular impact on you and perhaps influenced what you’ve gone on to do with your career?
Nick Cave's ‘The Carny’ was pretty influential for me. The narrative style and the spatial quality of the instrumentation I found very inspiring. Also bands like Godspeed You Black Emperor are also inspiring again because of the spatially complex quality of the music.
The Murder of CrowsClick to enlarge
Your use of sound is both intimate and disorientating – often creating a new reality for the participant – When did you first realize the power sound had to do this?
I first realized this when I started to do audio walks in which people listen to an audio track (while walking) that has been previously recorded (with binaural audio) in the same location. It was a complete surprise to me how effective the layering of the recorded sound effects were over the top of the real sounds of the physical location. The 3-D world created by the audio is parallel but different to the physical one but fools you by it’s invisible integration with the live sound. The two combine to make a third ‘reality’ or third ‘world’ that is quite disorientating for the participant.
40 Part Motet is the ultimate surround sound experience. What was the recording set up and process?
We recorded a choir of 60 singers (each soprano voice in playback was with 2-3 children) to 60 separate tracks. The singers were all recorded with their own lavaliere microphones mounted in front of them and each stood approximately a meter apart. The separate tracks went to a portable recording unit outside the building in a large truck. The tracks were then mixed down to 40 tracks and then the cross talk had to be edited out as well to create the really spatial quality that I wanted. It was a bit of a nightmare to record that piece with children involved since it is so complex but I wanted children’s voices rather than women’s. We ended up doing 3 takes and editing the best bits from there.
Being able to move around inside the choir and hear the music deconstructed is an extraordinary experience. What gave you the inspiration to create that?
When I first listened to the CD recording of Spem In Alium I knew that it was a 40 part harmony. I was blown away by the music but at the same time very frustrated by the mixing of all the voices into a coherent whole. I immediately had the idea to create it from 40 separate speakers so that I could deconstruct the piece of music, hearing each line separately. It was a simple idea but it was quite difficult technically as there was no computer playback system available that could do this at the time. After more research and time, Tascam released 24 track systems so then that made the piece possible. Now we use computer hard drives for playback.