~ swirling earworms~

Suvani Suri

// notes from a film

nowanights, said the ear, the daylights keep me awake 

 

A few seconds into the opening scene of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria, the protagonist is jolted awake with a sound that cuts through the frame. As the plot unravels, in her committed (bordering on obsessive) attempt to recreate it in a studio with a sound engineer, she describes the sound that she heard as “a big ball of concrete that falls into a metal well which is surrounded by seawater.”.

 

“Maybe, it is impossible”, she says (after describing it in this way)

What if the night of the world were to be compressed into a big ball of concrete that falls into a metal well which is surrounded by seawater. And then, what if one of the folds of this sonified bobble was to be inflated and stretched all the way into a large cavern that could be entered into, walked through, engulfed in, a fragment scratched off from the surfaces and carried around? Carried as an instrument that plays the world. The world of the night ticking away to the diegetic sound of one’s own voice.

 

// notes from an install

 

Audio modules expanding upon the topography of perceptual gaps in the auditory realm…thinking about the intermediatic space of/in hearing holes qua auditory illusions, on cartoon sounds and sonic interactions in digital interfaces.

cavity: conceal = noise: mask

A bed of white noise fills up the entire volume of space, masks all that happens to be outside of it and solidifying the inside, creating an internal cavity. A surface that one enters into to exit the outside. Just as sometimes the hole’s shape is entirely on the filler’s side, the hole in the room is constructed by the shape of the noise that fills it.

 

One of the modules comprises noise machines that are filling up (or making) the holey space. Also called sleep machines, these are commercially used to conceal ‘unwanted sounds’ that disrupt sleep, work or other acts of productive labour. Guaranteeing attention and uninterrupted focus, they create an infinite volume, a superficial cavity.

 

 niche:fill::notes:ricochet

 

The niche of directional audio, in a way, manufactures the entity of the superficial hollow. Acousmatic perforations created by the localised sound beams that bounce off the corner, get partially filled up by a scape of onomatopoeic sound effects native to cartoons and re-appropriated as auditory feedback by digital interfaces and electronic devices. The uncanny refractions created by the blips, bloops, boinks and pops, interspersed with the waves of whooshes and swishes render a spatial disorientation. One is in several places all at once. The nature of sonification in the boundaryless world of cartoon physics throws up questions about migratory, movable and detachable holes that come to the rescue when needed and can be ‘heard’ above all else. This is akin to the ‘niche’ effect in acoustics that describes the occurrence of a sound emission at the (spatio-temporal) moment when it is the most favourable and can travel to cut above all the rest. Here the niche is the corner, the hollow of sound, a hyper-directional stimuli enveloping one in the nonsense worlds of exaggerated sounds.

 

tunnel:slide::tone:glissando

 

The private and isolated listening space simulates the ontologically suspect entity of a tunnel, an infinite hollow or a hollow in an infinite host. An auditory illusion of a never-ending rise and fall that appears only in the physiological hearing of it. 

 

Cartoon Law I: Any body suspended in space will remain in space 

until made aware of its situation.

 

Until you look down, you won’t fall.  A gap in perception, the combination tones loop up and down, the glissando filling the host just as fast as un-filling it. The hole, in this incarnation of a sonorous joyride, takes shape in the privacy of the interior.