AARON
SIEGEL bio
| compositions
| installations
| performances
| recordings
| contact
mp3 excerpt
Stereo headphones are ubiquitous. We shield ourselves from surrounding sounds, often times with good reason. This piece considers the impossibility of seclusion. Environmental sounds from an airport, a busy city street, a subway station, and a suburban lawn inform only half of the stereo field.
49 bowls. Each made from different materials and with a different design. Yet they share a basic form. Like the bowls, the lake depth maps that are read as scores in the performance also are unified by gradations from shallow to deep.
Instead of being surrounded by sound objects, this piece provides an opportunity to surround the sound object. The tree of speakers sounds pulses pitched in the harmonic series’ of a diatonic octave starting with A 440 and resonates as an underlying meter for the entire environment.
Emitting from a pile of radios is the sound of a waterfall manipulated only with the means available to early radio pioneers. Often noisy, sometimes whispering, these sounds are a testament to the ambiguity of signified sounds. The radio is the most direct sound-only broadcast experience. A signal can be picked up by anyone with even the most humble receiver.
Let us not forget the sounds of this pavilion space. Layered and often truncated recordings from other gathering rooms voice the sonic flow of functional space.
