Summary
My Major Research Project consists of three sound based, performative projects. First my collaboration with Catherine Magill as PIPS. The work, Agnes and Her Forest: An Embodied Conversation was a blended installation and performance work, as an exploration of an outer suburban specific outside site. It was devised with two interconnected sections and grew from our individual work from Studio 1 and 2. In the second section I play flute into the the disused water tower, where inside there is playing a soundscape of the birds from onsite. The video is clip from a live performance.
The second project, Murrumbeena Station Precinct, is a suite of field recordings as a sound based investigation of a public site that is part of transport infrastructure. It is an intersectional point of public mobilities and has seen great environmental changes and impacts as its use has changed from pre-colonist time.
The third project, Towards The tonal Centre: A journey through Sound, developed from a collection of field recordings investigating the Queen Victoria Market. The slide show audio included is a compilation of that work. I have built a number of soundscapes of the Market on different days and times. I discovered that there is sound of cool room plant at its centre of a consistent pitch that runs 24 hours a day. It reveals itself as the symbolic tonal centre of Narrm (Melboune). Using a mobile speaker, I took the sound of the tonal centre for a walk around the market and played on flute at that pitch to explore how it moved through the site. My audio summary of the work ends with that sound.
I have included one imagine for each of the three projects.
TOWARDS A TONAL CENTRE is a journey through public space. This research project uses methods of deep and immersive listening, and responsive improvisation, in a blended method that includes site-specific installation and performance. I use sound to analyse and understand the social, political, and environmental nature of a series of sites across Melbourne. The research journeys inwards from the outer suburban zone, through the inner suburbs and into the Central Business District and provide a cross-section synthesis of what deep and immersive listening can tell us about the city.
The research commenced in the outer suburban zone and lead to the installation performance collaboration, Agnes and her Forest: An Embodied Conversation, (Dear Agnes Arts Festival, Altona, Victoria 2023). The inner suburban project, Murrumbeena Station Precinct, centres on the railway station and surrounds. Field recordings are used to reveal environmental change and materiality of mobilities, visible in sound.
The final project Towards the Tonal Centre: a Journey through Sound, arrives at the Queen Victoria Market in the Central Business District (CBD). (Public Art Project ’23, Testing Grounds, Melbourne, Victoria, 2023) This site resonates at the centre with the sound of market’s main cool rooms. I walk with a mobile soundscape through the market, and playing flute explore the shifts in the that tonal resonance as I move towards its source.
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