For my aurality performance, we (my group composed of xxx) decided to create a piece at the Tin Tabernacle in Kilburn using the space and its history as our medium. We found an old visitors book in the chapel and said the names, addresses and dates of the people who came to the Tin Tabernacle. We were willing to use the space rather than sound equipment and therefore didn’t alter any sounds. Laura and I were placed in the main room and Tin was in the vestibule on the phone, we could hear him through another phone which was plugged into a speaker in the centre of the audience. We were interested in the tension between audience and the sound hence the fact that we placed the audience right in the middle so they became a sort of pathway between the three voices. By doing so we managed to connect the positioning of the audience and sound. The layout of the audience created a notion of group intimacy as they were sitting in a circle facing inwards creating a space for reflection but also of collective listening and collectivity as the audience had one point of central focus : the sound emanating from the speakers in the center of the circle. I only realised later that having the computer in the middle of the audience’s circle was actually a distraction.
By doing so, we wanted to question the link between sound and memory. What we did was a pure diffusion of sound with only one artefact: the visitors’ book. Our performance was entirely devoted to sound, it appeared almost austere for the audience we were addressing it to. It was a minimalistic installation, that only came to life when the sound started. Going forward with our practice and using the feedback we received from our peers we would be interested in finding a way to have voices emanating from the space similarly to Janet Cardiff’s Forty Part Motet where as an audience member you could opt to sit in the middle of the room and listen to the wall of sound created by the joint effect of each speaker, but you could also move around the room, swooping down on this voice or that, causing through your action one voice to pop out and another to be drowned out.
In this essay, I will question how we – as active audience members – apprehend, through an active listening, the spaces in which we are in but also the use of digital technology within performing arts.
When a sound is produced in a space, whether it is a closed room, partially closed or an outside space, a part of the sound reaches directly our hear, it is called a direct sound. But the larger part of sound goes around the space, reflects on the floor, walls…, undergoes interferences, is transformed and finally reaches our ears.
“The main factors involved in the structure of the radiated field are:
– the sound source […]
– the propagation medium […]
– the nature of the walls and obstacles […]”
JOUHANEAU, Jacques / POLACK, Jean-Dominique, Acoustique des salles et sonorisation (1997, 3).
The way we perceive sound therefore depends of the characteristics of the source, the way it is spread, the acoustic of the space and finally the position of the listener.
We can decide whenever we want to stop seeing, we close our eyes and we can not see anymore. On the contrary we can never stop listening which means that silence does not exist. Even in space, without any atmosphere to conduct the sounds, in apnea we can always ear our organs. Absolute silence does not exist for humans. What we actually call silence is actually background noise, most of the time it is a succession of elements which are far away from us. If it does not exist it is be. If we consider sound as a signal, a disturbance compared to an initial state there must be a prior state ; background noise forms this prior state. It is therefore important to consider the sound elements of a space in relation to the background noise associated with this space.
According to Edmund Carpenter, each sound has an auditory space. An acoustic space is “a sphere without fixed boundaries, space made by the thing itself, not space containing the thing.” SEAMON, David, Dwelling, places and environment (1985, p.87). The further we go from the sound source the less we can hear it. Raymond Murray Schafer goes on to say that sound is creating its own space.
“When one first tries to conceptualise what acoustic space might consist of, the geometrical figure that most easily comes to mind is the sphere […]. One would then argue that a sound propagated with equal intensity in all directions simultaneously would more or less fill a volume of this description, weakening towards the perimeter until it disappeared altogether at a point that might be called the acoustic horizon.” MURRAY SCHAFER, Raymond, Acoustic Space (1991, p. 15-20).
As active audience members, we can therefore apprehend through an active listening the spaces in which we are in. I have also noticed that when we perceive sounds we are always trying to match what we see to what we hear and if one contradicts the other it is creating a disturbance.
These past few years, performing arts industry started to use more and more digital technology such as video, sounds… to renew the genre. But it seems like the created space if it starts to use too much technology and tends to look more like a demonstration of all the new technologies we have access to.
The use of digital technology sometimes seems to be a way to attract more audience. But isn’t a show only relying on technology ruining the many of performance? In June 2013 I saw at the Théâtre du Chatelet in Paris a performance called I was looking at the ceiling and then I saw the sky directed by Giorgio Barber Corseti. The title of the piece is pronounce by one of the character after the earthquake of Los Angeles in 1994. The piece is about the lives of seven different youths who are evolving in a simple set composed of gigantic blocks symbolising a city. The set is changing quite often and moving around – it is used as a support to project different visuals. I remember having the feeling as I left the auditorium that I had actually been to the cinema as I had never been able to feel fully immersed into the performance. As a scenographer show made me wonder if actually this kind of performance, heavily digital was the kind of performance I wanted to be involved in. With shows with budgets getting smaller set designers have less and less resources to create spaces and therefore digital equipments seems to be a good answer to this issue. Pierrick Sorrin says that it is “cheaper than using traditional sets as we can multiply them” (https://www.20minutes.fr/culture/1277087-20140121-20140121-rossini-enchante-pierrick-sorin-fait-leffet-chatelet).
New technologies are considerably increasing and are showing us so many possibilities in terms of creation but it is also deeply contemporary. Cyril Teste wrote that “theatre must appreciate its environment and ours cannot be separated from technology”. It is therefore an adaptation of the society but it should not fall in the opposite extreme: a presentation of everything we can do in terms of technology at a given moment. New technologies are therefore tools to enrich artistic creation and some artists even use it in a way to talk about contemporary concept and touch a wider audience.
As an emerging scenographer this research on the link between sound and scenography but also on the use of digital technology was really interesting and nourished my practice. I have noticed through different professional experience that sound had a tendency to be forgotten during productions when I truly believe that sound is really evocative and can translate so many emotions (as we have seen during our performance “36 Princess Road” at the Tin Tabernacle). This whole allocation helped me to realise that I really enjoyed working with sound and aurality in general and I decided to do go further in that direction as I am working on theatre with headphones for my sustained independent project.