Output details

Sonic Metaphors of Cultural Processes and Histories in Sound Installations and Related Practices. Combined output:

Collapsing Old Buildings (2011)

Multichannel generative site-specific spatial sound installation (max. duration 29 mins); premiered at the Contemporary Music Centre (CMC), Ireland, commissioned for Dublin Culture Night and the CMC’s 25th anniversary, 23 September 2011,

and

Ripples of Inertia Bells (2013)

Radiophonic spatial music/sound art piece for binaural stereo (26’09/28’15 including introduction); premiered by Resonance FM/Resonance@Void, Derry/Londonderry UK City of Culture 2013, November 2013.

These pieces are part of an on-going project investigating site-informed contexts in the choice of formal processes applied to sound materials embodying significant cultural associations. The processes and materials reference significant formative periods in the socio-economic histories of two cities on the island of Ireland (Dublin and Derry) and both pieces are also situated in contemporary Irish cultural developments: the 25th anniversary of the founding of Ireland’s Contemporary Music Centre (2011) and Derry/Londonderry’s year as UK City of Culture (2013).

“Collapsing Old Buildings” was installed in the Contemporary Music Centre in Fishamble Street, Dublin, next to the site of the premiere of Handel’s “Messiah”. It traces a line between the boom-time milieu of Handel’s visit (Dublin’s Georgian heyday) and the city’s subsequent economic decline, during which impressive eighteenth-century townhouses were subdivided into some of the worst tenements in Europe. The piece’s structure articulates a metaphorical connection with this collapse, as the ‘edifice’ of eighteenth-century harmony experiences microtonal subdivision. A cadential sample from the 1916 Edison recording of the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ undergoes a cyclical process (lasting 1742 seconds, 1742 being the date of the premiere) whereby multiple instances are offset (in pitch and time) upwards by a major third and downwards by a perfect fourth (prominent intervals in the original piece), creating a series of microtonal ‘afterimages’ from an initial ‘collapse’ containing all intervals.

“Ripples of Inertia Bells” references prominent bells from the Derry soundscape: those of the Guildhall and St Eugene’s (Catholic) Cathedral; soundmarks which occupy time as well as denoting sonic territory, binding the present with traditions possessing durability and inertia. Intervals from an Anglican hymn (“There is a green hill”) composed in the city provide the superstructure for the process, creating meandering transpositions which evoke the complex nature of Derry’s contested history. The process takes 1613 seconds, referencing Derry’s Royal Charter.