Australian Music Centre | Breaking sound barriers

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The Australian Music Centre's catalogue does not include any recordings or sheet music of this work. This entry is for information purposes only.

It is listed in our catalogue because an event featuring a performance of this work was included in our calendar of Australian music. Details of this performance are listed below.

Work Overview

Slip-stick - an absent bow is covered by curved finger proxies, which stagger, rub, and tenderly brush - sketching a cello playing grounded in ambidextrous, hyper-sensitive tactility.

The audience wear open-back headphones; via extreme amplification, they gain extraordinary access to a delicate sound world that would be otherwise impossible to hear. The open-back design eschews isolation, its porous qualities blur individual and communal spaces-live, ambient sounds and audience behaviours are perceptible.

All present listen closely, together.

Discreet interventions from the speakers blend seamlessly with the aforementioned sounds. Mixing between live sources, headphones, and speaker diffusion affords a heightened sense of proximity, distance, width and depth. The dimensionality of the experience progressively expands-live sounds are nuanced by the layering of sampled virtual spaces; stereo becomes 3D; micro-gestures are connected to distant sources, more-than-human and otherwise-all tracing an irreducibly specific and unique network of associations in each performance.

An ASMR-like musing on mediated intimacy, auditory hallucination, care, and surveillance.

Work Details

Year: 2023

Instrumentation: Cello, electronics, diffused over headphones and speakers

Duration: 15 min.

Difficulty: Advanced

Dedication note: Written for David Moran