fixed media immersive sound
5'17"
Atlantic Center for the Arts, New Smyrna, FL, 2018
R. Murray Schafer pointed out in 1977 that our soundscape is increasingly lo-fi, often the sound of traffic or, especially at the Atlantic Center for the Arts where this piece was composed, planes. While quiet is harder to come by, there are wonderful new sounds too, like the spray-paint can clicking of a hard-disk failure or powering on a belt sander. And yet, we increasingly fetishize a return to not just natural soundscapes, but the natural. Once we frame nature as being different (as a thing to return to), reality becomes an appearance of itself— obfuscating the naturalism of architecture, pharmaceutics, and software engineering under a guise of transparency. Are we ourselves not the nature to which we desire to return? In the “broken” appearance of this composition’s soundscape, perhaps we can hear ourselves in relation to the natural world as, echoing William Carlos Williams, “touched but not held, more often broken by the contact.”