Immersive Sonic Journeys: a creative lab

This Creative Lab is a collaboration between Melbourne Recital Centre and RMIT University exploring ways the foyers and stairwells of the Centre can be used for spatial sound works.

The performance spaces of the Centre are renowned for their acoustic design, providing audiences with a high-quality listening experience. The exemplary acoustic design means other spaces throughout the Centre are isolated from external city sounds, and not subject to the ubiquitous low frequency drone of air-conditioning found in nearly all other city buildings.

The foyers and stairwells spiral around the Elizabeth Murdoch Hall and Primrose Potter Salon like a cochlear, creating a journey through the building for walking while listening in an acoustic that is unique. SIAL Sound Studios and the DSP Research Group at RMIT commissioned four artists, and adapted previous commissions and new works to be presented on two spatial sound systems installed along this journey.

This lab is an exploration of ways the Centre’s program could be extended throughout a day for other types of sound works and spatial listening experiences for Melbourne audiences, moving beyond traditional seated concerts to a mobile and spatial sonic experience.

Daily Schedule – click here

Program Notes:

she finds her self in a body of water (12:00) – Jane Sheldon

This work imagines an ecstatic, sensual, rapturous attraction to water, in which the desired meeting with water necessitates a temporary abandonment of self. I am thinking of ecstasy in the sense defined by Anne Carson: ‘This is the condition called ekstasis, literally “standing outside oneself,” a condition regarded by the Greeks as typical of mad persons, geniuses and lovers, and ascribed to poets by Aristotle.’ The work features a fragment of text from Carson; its main text is Guillaume Apollinaire’s Il pleut (1918), a poem which beautifully conflates women’s voices, falling water, and memory. This work is inspired by the story of Hannah Upp’s dissociative fugues, in which abandonment and recovery of self seem mysteriously entangled with an attraction to water.

Text:

Il pleut des voix de femmes comme si elles étaient mortes même dans le souvenir

c’est vous aussi qu’il pleut, merveilleuses rencontres de ma vie ô gouttelettes

et ces nuages cabrés se prennent à hennir tout un univers de villes auriculaires

écoute s’il pleut tandis que le regret et le dédain pleurent une ancienne musique

écoute tomber les liens qui te retiennent en haut et en bas

– Guillaume Apollinaire

It’s raining women’s voices as if they had died even in memory
it’s raining you, too, marvellous encounters of my life o little drops
and those rearing clouds begin to neigh a whole universe of auricular cities
listen as it rains while regret and disdain weep to an ancient music
listen to the bonds fall which hold you above and below

***Refractional: L’eau Bleue (4:01) & Worship* (11:50) – Charlotte Leamon**

Refractional highlights the symbiosis between listener, music, and the interior architecture of the Melbourne Recital Centre. Audiences are encouraged to feel, touch, and observe the intricate colourations, textures, and materials of the centre through a sound walk. Through this walk the voices and music of Refractional are heard and shared between listeners as they refuge away from the hustle and bustle of the city. Frozen in this moment as others continue their journeys in the ‘real world’.

Temporal Passage (20:00) – Jasmin Wing-Yin Leung

Vocalist: Tina Stefanou

Movement and perception traced through the architecture of ascent and descent. Pure tones, laced with human voice, trace the resonant frequencies of the Blue Stairwell, articulating the unique sonic ‘fingerprint’ of this intimate space through echo. Working with simple canonical structures, Temporal Passage unveils the acoustic properties of this small, reflective space – where the movements and shapes of sound are perceived through ascent and descent. An echo of this work is also diffused into the main foyer, where the same material is instead thrown into the stark, open space and allowed to decay – resulting in two different perceptions, a warped mirror of the same source.

Hutan Plastic | Plastic Jungle (9:11) Patrick Hortano

This piece narrates the tragedy of 36,094.4 hectares of pristine forest in West Papua that are slated to be destroyed to make way for palm oil plantations. It draws attention to the irreversible environmental loss and the cultural dislocation such destruction brings to the indigenous communities who have lived in harmony with these ecosystems for generations. The work questions whether the forest, a vital lung of our planet, will still exist for future generations and explores the far-reaching environmental impact of deforestation both nationally and globally. By juxtaposing the beauty of nature with the impending threat of its erasure, the piece seeks to provoke reflection on the consequences of unchecked industrial expansion.

Bells, Gongs (8:02) Lawrence Harvey (2004, 2024)

A compilation from two earlier works based on metallic resonances. Backface City (2004) and Safehold (2024) were composed for respectively a VR experience and a dance work. Long drawn out metallic textures transformed from a single gong string and higher pitched modulations of the Federation hand bells.

Soft Body Death Highway (20:00) – Meri Leeworthy (2022)

Soft Body Death Highway is an epic electronic requiem, coming out of a time in which I’ve faced the closest proximity to death in my life so far. I made this work remembering the times over the last two years where I’ve faced a mounting wall of fear, collapse and devastation, times in which the social fabric of reality has seemed to shift in a way that frightens me, times in which the continued progress of the colonial State machine has caused immeasurable loss and pain, and times in which time has seemed to collapse upon itself, reanimating the past with unwelcome repetition.

Inspired by the work of Tim Hecker and Caterina Barbieri as well as Meredith Monk and Arvo Pärt, Soft Body Death Highway is the result of patching a modular synthesiser to produce semi-generative music, wherein a system of modulators is tuned to create complex movement and variation at the meso-timescale. I understand the resulting system to be an example of what N. Katherine Hayles calls ‘nonconscious cognition’, in this case producing a musical artefact through the interaction of rules, impulses, sonic information and my own emotional response as the performer. In the 24-speaker Black Box, audience members are additionally able to interactively listen to the work through their spatial orientation. Creative production as the result of complex interactions between autonomous actors can be understood as synecdoche for the ‘cognitive assemblages’ (Hayles) that compose the broader political economy, and in turn perhaps help us understand the role of memory and emotion in the operation of these formidable machines.

Patterns of Self-Organisation (In swarms) (21:00) – Joseph Callaly (2022)

The Patterns of Self-Organisation (In Swarms) project by Joseph Callaly was first presented as an ambisonic installation at RMIT’s Black Box Gallery. Through imitating the properties of swarms, the work allows unexpected musical effects to emerge from a seemingly chaotic system. Thousands of individual grains of sound interact spatially to produce an enveloping musical performance, provoking at times both harshness and sentimentality.