Echoes & Reflections

Echoes & Reflections

23 June 2024

Echoes and Reflections is a series of nine sound works created by Juliana Venter, Iti, Natasha Barrett, Sharon Phelan, Dorit Crysler, Aurélie Ferrière, Rob Brinkworth, Nora van Tonder, Victoria Keddie, and Cobi van Tonder. These works offer a unique listening experience by combining virtual acoustic heritage sites with composition, while reflecting on the myth and meaning of Echo.

Everything about our consciousness seems to be a continuing process of mirroring — from language, behaviour, empathy, and the sharing of images, tweets, and internet memes. Music is perhaps the most delightful mirroring of consciousness, rippling through our minds as part of its ongoing evolution. Music can also act as a material that crosses boundaries between interior (body–mind) space and the exterior world, a relationship beautifully mirrored in architecture through the play between open landscapes and enclosed, intimate interiors.

This album begins with a meditation on echo through mythology: the story of Echo, the cursed nymph who loses sovereignty over her voice and can only repeat the last words spoken to her (Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book III, tr. A. S. Kline). In Phonurgia Nova (1673), Athanasius Kircher defined two meanings of echo: first, as reflected or repeated voice; and second, as resonance — the phenomenon that occurs when wavelengths fit optimally within a space, causing structures to vibrate and produce interference patterns perceived by both ear and body.

The nine pieces in this album also engage with current research in sonic archaeology and architectural heritage acoustics, fields concerned with acoustic measurements of heritage sites as well as forensic simulations of ruins that no longer exist in their original form. This research invites dialogue with audible experience — encouraging us to listen to heritage through contemporary, futuristic, poetic, and playful modes, and to explore virtual acoustic spaces with curiosity and intuition.

The artists were invited to select or imagine sites and to use their echoes as musical material. Approaches vary widely: some artists work spectrally, listening closely to reverberation and resonance and building sound from those qualities, or drawing from mythologies connected to specific places (Venter, Crysler). Others take a more direct approach through field recording (Barrett, Keddie, Brinkworth). In some works, architectural form becomes a graphic score; in others, musical traditions and instrumental practices are introduced into spaces as acts of juxtaposition (Iti, Nora). Some contributions explore abstract, philosophical, or entirely imaginary sites (Ferrière, Phelan).

Curation

Cobi van Tonder

Artists

Juliana Venter, Iti, Natasha Barrett, Sharon Phelan, Dorit Crysler, Aurélie Ferrière, Rob Brinkworth, Nora van Tonder, Victoria Keddie, Cobi van Tonder

Album cover images

Nat Loyola

Design

Claudiusantibodies

Mastering

Jim Green

Immersive WebAudio code

Pablo Cúbico

Label

Acoustic Atlas
https://www.acousticatlas.de/echoesalbum

Bandcamp

Also available on Bandcamp
https://telepathicbeing.bandcamp.com/album/echoes-and-reflections

This project was made possible by the European Commission Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 897905, with additional support from the University of York (HEIF A&H Impact Funding).

Further thanks to Mariana Lopez, Lisa Peschel, Helen Jones, Joel Baker, Rebecca Perkins, Jenny Searle, Natalie Fullwood, and the Humanities Research Centre, University of York.

Thank you to the nymphs.