Audio inside APHASIA

Audio inside APHASIA

You may recall from an earlier blog posting (The Door Installation) that to enter APHASIA, one must make the simple yet conscious action of opening, walking through, then closing a red door.  On the outside of that door is the gentle sound of greeting and preparation in the antechamber - a deconstructed and re-composed setting of Céad míle fáilte (an excerpt of that sound installation appears in the earlier blog entry).

Once inside APHASIA, though, the sound world is very different. Starker, stripped back, at times inaudible...

There are two main elements to the sound inside APHASIA:

• Quadraphonic sound installation
• Infrasonic installation

In this update, we are going to concentrate on the quadraphonic sound installation, leaving the infrasonic business for a little later...

Naturally, the quadraphonic set-up refers to the four speakers that surround the dominant space of APHASIA.  In the current gallery floor-plan, you can see how this operates, with X marking the spot for each speaker.

Entering from the doorway at the bottom, the spectator moves up and through the sculptural installation (details to follow in a grand update!) and into the larger space at the top of the floor plan. The four speakers spatialise sound for that section of the gallery.  You might also notice a subwoofer there - that is reserved for the infrasonic component...

The through-composed sound installation loops every 40'17" (the 359th prime: 2417"...with 359 also just short of a complete perfect circle [of 360 degrees] and itself a prime) with the principle materials being:

• recordings of Darragh's voice reading letters she has saved from years ago, retelling her dreams, whispering, speaking, declaiming
• the sounds of breathing
• percussion sounds (metals, skins, and prepared piano)
• sines and the products of their interaction

Together, these materials are presented in such a way that complete meaning and understanding is near, but always out of reach.  The use of text assists in this - with text clusters rendering most words indecipherable, but the occasional word recognisable. It is incomplete, with any attempt to render a coherent meaning ending in misinterpretation - a misunderstanding. 

Words colliding, merging, making fantastic and unreal meaning...the rendering of an aphasic experience.

You can hear some of these aspects in the example presented as part of this blog entry. The audio presented here is best experienced through headphones or dedicated speakers.

The use of four speakers to telegraph this experience is a choice made by Team D that permits low volume sound to envelope and immerse those who travel the installation. It also permits the demarcation of a sonic 'sweet-spot' in the installation, where the directionality of sound emanating from each speaker intersects, providing the ultimate APHASIA experience - the point where the sound language is complete (both the quadraphonic and infrasonic installations), and the visual language is complete (as one exits the sculptural installation and sees the video projection for the first time). 

It is the peak moment of APHASIA.  A complete dissociation. 

And as with all things dissociative, something that cannot be explained, only experienced...

D&D