The Endless Mobility of Listening

For violin (or other bowed string) and live electronics, variable duration (20-60mins); performed-installation or concert versions. Performances by Mira Benjamin in Sheffield, Vancouver, Victoria, London, Oslo, performed by Scott Mc Laughlin (cello) in Huddersfield. Commissioned by Mira Benjamin with funding from Britten-Pears foundation. This piece foregrounds the spectral properties of sound – the contour of its inner structures, flows, and weights – and reveals these material structures over slow time. [Musician] plays long drones on open strings, listening inside the spectrum of that sustained note and allowing the sound to gently split, like an acoustic prism. [Musician] shapes not the sound itself, but its possibilities, by encouraging the energy from the bow to flow more freely into unusual resonances of the string. [Musician's] listening is active and open, [their] bow gives the string opportunities to wander. [Musician's] inward spectral listening (listening inside the sound to its structures, flows, and forces) is projected outward by allowing the vibration to become metastable. The string has many possible stable states of vibration, not just the ‘ground’ (its given pitch and timbre) but also many different harmonics and multiphonics. This affords a dynamic sound percept, a process of listening in flux creates a performative sound in flux, moving between the singular and the multiple, solid pitch and refracted multiphonic states which overlap and co-exist. The revealed metastable sounds can be ephemeral and ghostlike, so this piece makes the compositional choice to ‘load the deck’ in two ways that ‘circumscribe’ the open-ness without sacrificing it. The E-string is detuned to B5 (-14c), whose strong octave harmonic (B6) matches the 5th harmonic within the spectrum of the G string. This creates a structural resonance in the piece that may allow a prominent B to emerge on some level; depending on indeterminate environmental conditions. Over the duration of the piece, open strings are periodically detuned to pitches that also contain B6, allowing different structures of resonance, different contours of material agency for [Musician] to surf. The ephemeral multiphonics are captured and looped by the electronics, freezing the sounds in memory as a growing carpet of coloured noise. The drone is sometimes interrupted by chorales of harmonics; brief interludes of solidity in a sea of flux.