Output details

Inside / Outside

Inside/Outside is part of the international Music and Movement project undertaken by the Six Tones (the collective name for the acoustic Swedish-Vietnamese ensemble of Ngo, Nguyen and Ostersjo) and supported by the Swedish Research Council. For the project, The Six Tones commissioned Wright to research how digital sound design could add contrapuntal and spatial dynamism to their acoustic performance.

In the work, three performers with traditional Vietnamese instruments and clothing were placed in separate glass boxes, in the manner of a gallery exhibition. The audience simultaneously heard the acoustic sound from inside the boxes; live processing and pre-recorded material outside the boxes (via quadrophonic sound); and a further layer of the installation inside headphones. Thus a navigable mix of sound from inside and outside was perceivable by the audience.

The installation took place in Hanoi, Vietnam in November 2012 and the recordings were structured and mixed by Wright into this recording, for which he formulated four conceptual approaches to the sound design:

i) a playful digital manipulation inside and outside the frequency spectrum and rhythmic content of the original acoustic signals, thus suggesting the inside of the laptop hard drive;

ii) the use of ambient room recordings from outside the glass boxes; these tracks also contain the almost subliminal sound of street traffic relentlessly rushing past outside the installation space;

iii) discrete pre-recorded material from inside the glass boxes (which was also fed into the headphones during the installation);

iv) inside of the memory of the listener; by utilising heavy reverb and wide spatial placement, the sensation of ‘distance’ from the live performance was created, suggesting a cognitive dissonance between ‘reality’ (acoustic live performance) and ‘nostalgia’ (prerecorded, heavily effected recordings).

Recordings of the installation:

https://myspace.com/thesixtones/videos

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6DdIa5LYw0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WAbZHDr0oo