A life at the radio’s threshold(2014) (for piano, percussion, violin, viola, cello, sampler and individual mini vibration speakers) My childhood was determined by the constant presence of a radio at the apartment where I lived. It created an irregular sonic layer that blended with all aspects of daily experience, altering the potential stillness of a conventional domestic environment. The voices interfered with the sounds of the courtyard, the kitchen, the living room, the neighbours, the muffled murmur of the exterior, the air conditioning, birds nesting underneath the window apron, etc. These voices were mostly unintelligible, badly tuned, saturated with white noise and other unwanted frequencies, far away, in a nebulous, undecipherable distance. They operated as extensions of the house’s acoustic geography. In this piece, I want to recreate this aural world by transferring the sound of the human voice to the different surfaces and strings of the ensemble instruments. The voices that are projected by the tiny vibration speakers merge indissolubly with the acoustic nature of the instruments. These loudspeakers are used as substitutes for bows, beaters and resonators, responding directly to the performative gestures. The voices have been extracted from different radio interviews, featuring writers, artists and filmmakers whose work has influenced my trajectory as a composer to a varying degree. Berkeley wrote that “the taste of the apple is neither in the apple itself nor in the mouth of the eater: it requires contact between them”. My work departs from a similar principle: music is neither in the instrument nor in the loudspeaker but in the contact between them. The original sources fade out, resulting in a new sonic syncretism. audio         more texts           home