<i>Soundkitchen EARspace</i>

Inside the Box is an octophonic sound spatialisation composition designed for Soundkitchen EARspace in collaboration with Frontier Festival. It was played on March 21. at Minerva Works, in Digbeth, Birmingham (UK). Minerva Works is a unique cluster of artist-led initiatives, exhibition spaces, studios and workshops sitting beside the tranquil waters of the Grand Union canal.

My project uses the proposed standard configuration of 8 speakers arranged in a circle. The 8 speakers are fed with 8 different monophonic tracks and synchronised together.

Soundkitchen EARspace engineers setting up the PA system.

Think outside the box, listen inside the box. Short program note Imagine you are inside a giant music box, surrounded by notes coming from all direction around. Not only is the dimension of the installation oversized compared to the regular instrument, but the sound itself becomes bigger and bigger as the music unfolds until it becomes overwhelming. The oneiric soundscape created by the sparse instrumentation of the beginning takes life as more notes are added. As the resulting friction grows, the sound slowly electrifies and thickens, giving a strained and thrilling dimension to the initial gentle soundscape. Complex harmonies arise and become entangled to the point of almost forgetting the presence of the original music box. When the drone sound drops down, the listener is suddenly brought back to rest to the sound of an idle lullaby. Inside the Box is a multichannel composition specifically designed for Soundkitchen EARspace 2015. Short artist’s statement The theme addressed by Inside the box is the reference to acoustic instruments. The idea behind this project was to use only one of the smallest acoustic instrument, i.e. the music box, limited to 8 notes. Each of these is assigned to one of the eight speakers disposed circularly. When entering the listening space, the listener is surrounded by the delicate sound of the music box, as if s/he was in the centre of the revolving cylinder plucking the tuned metal lamellae of the instrument. Thanks to digital sound treatments (no additional instrument is used here), the original miniature music progresses towards a saturated sonic environment, until calm is restored.