Australian Music Centre | Breaking sound barriers

The choir use a video scoring system, which is a sequence of word, phonetic, fricative, and plosive fragments scrolling across the screen. The sequences are laid out across the four voices (Soprano+Alto+Tenor+Bass) and the choir vocalise the letters as they scroll over a red line.

The choir are also asked to follow video sequences with the instruction to vocalise the sounds they imagine the video would be making, much like a foley artist. At the beginning of the accompanying video there is footage of a match stick being struck back and forth in a looped sequence. At the end, the match sparks a flame and burns in slow motion, showing a transformation of this visual motif. The vibraphone player complements this by brushing across sandpaper with a small piece of wood, back and forth repeatedly at varying speeds and pressure. This relationship to me represents ideas of resistance, tension and friction. Much like the friction of a bow on strings, it slips and sticks.

The structure of the ensemble part is laid out as 3 repeated sections much like the 3 by 3 grid of the ocean footage used in the accompanying video, as it crashing against the rocks in different temporal states.

A section in the score asks the choir to whisper short quotes from parents describing the mental state of their children living in Australian immigration detention centres such as: "Open and close, open and close", "The locks and the chains", "I am a bird in a cage", "I am an animal". These were taken from the National Inquiry into Children in Immigration Detention: Mental Health of Children in Immigration Detention, 2004