SoundWords

The Madison Hotel in Belfast

Thu, 16 May 2013 23:06:16 +0100

is composed form low rumbling, higher pitched vibrating and strangled singing. The sound builds the room as a dense slow throbbing timespace, accelerated by shriller penetrating sounds, infused with strumming and yelping that rise as an alcohol imbued resonance through the grey carpet adding a beat and a shriek.

Zürich SoundWords*

Sat, 04 May 2013 22:51:35 +0100

xxxxx she talks just like this girl I know nananana maybe it`s her xxxxx hahaha, she goes xxxxx he`s silent, maybe xxxxx I love trains xxx would stay here forever, better just sleep xxxxx never wake up nananananana xxxxx nanananana again xxxxx I forgot to call my doctor xxxxx pay my bill yesterday xxxxx hahahashe, she goes again xxxxx just shut up xxx I want to be alone xxxxx not lonely xxxxx hahaha

Elena Habicher

*This is a guest edition of SoundWords featuring writing by students and staff at zhdk, Zürich Hochschule der Künste, Switzerland, www.zhdk.ch

Zürich SoundWords*

Thu, 02 May 2013 21:25:03 +0100

not the first time

me in between four others. two to the left. two to the right.
the conversation evolves. damp, cautious, controlled, careful circulation.

i slowly press myself backwards into the leather sofa. you know.
leaving this circulation of words, being brought from one point to the other.
words enfolding meaning, power, intention, emotion, sight.
trusting in the steady continuation of exchange.

a piercing movement from an upper story.
now hovering slightly in-between these monotonous fields.
astonished by they’re coexistence.

Julia Znoj

*This is a guest edition of SoundWords featuring writing by students and staff at zhdk, Zürich Hochschule der Künste, Switzerland, www.zhdk.ch

The water-jet

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 09:39:06 +0100

at the local pool sounds the hollowness of my head. Droning over skin and through bones it uses my body as a speaker, whose sound I alone hear. It is an internal amplification of my cranium, my neck and my spine sounding its resistance against the water spray that loosens it. My ears, immersed under water, hear this private and intimate soundscape playing out against the visual background of communal water fun and swimming. The lively sounds of kids playing and diving are muted by my privately amplified body that publicaly is silent but exposed in its listening.

The clock

Sun, 10 Mar 2013 21:08:00 +0000

on the mantelpiece sounds its own purpose. Relentlessly, unstoppably, always the same. Tick tocking rhythmic constants, it sounds the interdependence between what it is and what it does. Disappearing into the domestic soundscape of the living room for a while, emerging again in a quiet moment, only reminding me that it never went away. I wait for a change, hoping to trip up its regularity with my ears. Willing to hear self-determination assert itself in my auditory imagination, to sound another time.

Other people’s parties

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 23:18:08 +0000

sound the uncontrollable and produce the anxiety of cheerlessness.

Hong Kong SoundWords*

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 09:31:25 +0000

move / wolf / wind / murmuring / run / cling /
crash / smash / air pressure / hit / resonance / presence /
rotation / motor / refraction / vibration / huh / echoes /

breathe / tweet / whisper / blow / slow / heartbeat /
leave / lever / shout / howl / laugh / whistle / palpitate /
bake / loud / chat / hum / sweat / evaporate /

tsang sin yu

*This is a guest edition of SoundWords featuring writing by the artists in residence at Around Sound art festival organised by soundpocket Hong Kong 2013, www.soundpocket.org.hk

Hong Kong SoundWords*

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 22:27:55 +0000

6:00pm , Yue Wan Estate, Chai Wan, workdays.

Birds are super excited and crazy. I can’t imagine if they are sparrows. That will make more sense if they are living in a big cage all together. The banyan implanted in the middle of the public square in the public estate.

City skyline

Winds in leaf

Public estate Atmos

Medium busy traffic

Park Ambience

Old men talking and gambling

Metal pole, heavy, long, thick, DROP

With Resonance, reverb by the 7-floor walled design estate, pre-delay time is quite long.
…
…….
………

birds tweet are cut off, definitely no fading encoded by me.

One small bird first said he/she is hungry. And all the birds become crazy again.

But I have never seen them once. Going back to office on time or leave the office as soon as possible.

Turkish-blue submarine and 5/F spaceship.

50Hz analog sub-bass low hum

24 hours a day

6 days a week

dizzy harmonics

a cell in Eastern State Penitentiary on Sundays

…

I was called hoi-chan by some tomodati and we become nakama.

wong chun hoi

*This is a guest edition of SoundWords featuring writing by the artists in residence at Around Sound art festival organised by soundpocket Hong Kong 2013, www.soundpocket.org.hk

Hong Kong SoundWords*

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 14:22:23 +0000

Wednesday night and Thursday morning

I was jogging along the route of the river
in a gentle night, by one glimpse stopping my hasty steps
accidentally, and sacred

wonderful-lonesome white in sight
yet pure harmony in sound
Come, listen
within same vocal cords
we are speaking principles
that always different

How do you sure
To eliminate this little hiss
which not such matter?

sound of the wind
wind is the silk
silk weaving the cloth of world
world giving you rights to listen
listen manifest the existentialism in sound

How do you sure
To blow up this tiny voice
which not such matter?

Time flies as floating breeze
escaped from slit of our griping hand
cohered at creator’s memory like me and you

You know you have this power
One tiny clue reveals the general trend

Come, listen
next time when you hear
something totally being neglected
from this busy city, shrinking vitality

Tse Chun Sing

*This is a guest edition of SoundWords featuring writing by the artists in residence at Around Sound art festival organised by soundpocket Hong Kong 2013, www.soundpocket.org.hk

Hong Kong SoundWords*

Sat, 02 Feb 2013 14:07:16 +0000

It seems that we’ve prepared all these years for the coming of the day.
Death is always a mystery to me and so many others.
No matter you are ready or not, it is always in front of us and
we can never catch it until the day comes. Indeed….
The invisible force will pull us into the ‘light’ when the buzzing sound fades in, to wrap the surroundings.
This is my imagination of death.

Anthony Yeung

*This is a guest edition of SoundWords featuring writing by the artists in residence at Around Sound art festival organised by soundpocket Hong Kong 2013, www.soundpocket.org.hk

Hong Kong SoundWords*

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 17:34:34 +0000

Walking by the harbour.
Singing with the sounds I hear:

eeee/ beep-beep/ OOooh/ khkeee/ ssssst/ krak!/ wee-ee/ mmM/ yip!/ gagagaga

Pause. I trill: drrr?

A chorus of birds joins in:
DRRR/ PRRR?/ BRRR/ TRRR?/ RRR?/ DRRRRR!

Viv Corringham

*This is a guest edition of SoundWords featuring writing by the artists in residence at Around Sound art festival organised by soundpocket Hong Kong 2013, www.soundpocket.org.hk

Hong Kong SoundWords*

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 09:08:26 +0000

Shau Kai Wan MTR Station

I am drawn by music for the blind. This sound gets glued to my consciousness, somehow uplifting and melancholic at the same time. It has an air of the psychedelic, shifting between nursery rhyme and experimentalism in a blink like the theme music of a video game, it guides my feet to feel shapes on the floor meant to move the visually impaired around the vicinity on a set path.

All sounds are artificial in this place. The randomly occurring tunes created by the changing tones of the ticket barriers resonate from near and far add to the sense that I might at any moment become pixelated. These sounds represent movement and transition, all sounds and movements are controlled and predictable in this arena.

I stop to listen to the grinding of gears and motors as electronic stairs complete their endless cycle. This to me is the sound of laziness as willing participants allow themselves to be propelled by the force of electricity up steep gradients. Several rhythms are contained in this momentum – a constant mechanical buzz and whirr augmented by a steady, fast paced click.

Below my feet a train pulls into the station and I feel the whole building shake with a low rumble as if there has been a distant earthquake. I step outside, above the din of the city I faintly hear an aeroplane pass overhead as if the clouds have torn the ozone layer like paper and I realise that we truly are living at the end of time.

Matt Cook

*This is a guest edition of SoundWords featuring writing by the artists in residence at Around Sound art festival organised by soundpocket Hong Kong 2013, www.soundpocket.org.hk

Hong Kong SoundWords*

Thu, 31 Jan 2013 14:40:44 +0000

1
If the thinging of the thing is an act of elongation, an act of stretching (with Elaine Scarry somewhere at the back), what is the voicing of the body, and does it matter if the body is human?
Naming may exclude by way of that notion of actuality manifested in the authority of the object, as Salome proposes. Does actualizing that which comes before the naming not require a level of fluency (in gesture, orality, or literacy etc.) that may also exclude?

To follow her (voice) is to follow each word, each enunciation, as an invitation, an active and vibrating border of something, some thing. To make language ready, she says.

2
An empty space is solid when everything moves as they stand still, too. “Sound mirrors the space,” Tetsuya says. Laying back, he does, and the rest takes care of itself. It is a certain mockery of calories - weight not as volume or mass, but as focus.

3
I brought Akio some green chopsticks, and thought of the female singer duo Chopsticks Sisters 筷子姊妹花.
(http://home.ied.edu.hk/~hkpop/music/hkpophistory.html - check out 1970s Part 1)
see also - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYYMUyTTavQ
(I was born that year!!)

4
So far. So good.

5
Mongkok. 5’55pm.

6
I think my voice sounds different when I speak to strangers than when I speak to people I know well.

Yang Yeung

*This is a guest edition of SoundWords featuring writing by the artists in residence at Around Sound art festival organised by soundpocket Hong Kong 2013, www.soundpocket.org.hk

Hong Kong SoundWords*

Tue, 29 Jan 2013 18:20:57 +0000

Orange plastic bucket
Six five and four inch nails
Akio Suzuki takes his time hammering
Each one into a line sound
Along each of several lengths
Of 4x4 timber laid end to end
On wooden trestles
That have three legs

He takes his time

Ferry boat arrives waves wash
Concrete disturb fish and rubbish
Floating sound

Walk away toward Viv Corringham’s
Shadow Walking siren sounds mixed
With turned up transistor radio
Protest of ferryboat ticket collector
who asks -
“why did you have to make this music so horrible?”
And a voice replies “…the shape of words”

Meanwhile Matt Cooke’s small heath robinson like constructions
of wood wire and electric motors
delicately tinkle and scrape and buzz and whir
In a corner unpreturbed sounds

Returning upstairs Akio and Hiromi
Miyakita are rolling beer bottles full
of water on concrete floor sound

Whistle and footsteps on metal as
passengers board and the ferry departs.

Mike Cooper

*This is a guest edition of SoundWords featuring writing by the artists in residence at Around Sound art festival organised by soundpocket Hong Kong 2013, www.soundpocket.org.hk

a bad Skype connection

Sat, 26 Jan 2013 22:30:49 +0000

sounds its own failure. Halting sound in a space of time, an echoing hall of nothing, interrupted by crackling anticipation and finally silent defeat. I hope for some drawn out words that have lost their shape to reform and extend themselves to me. Instead I get digital clicking, grating, grazing the listener and the talker in a material of their connection that does not connect to speak but to sense the presence of the medium not connecting. The technology sounds its presence as a thick immutable fog of material filling the space between not with its distance but its present obstruction of proximity. Echoing back what needs to go there, and impeding the there to be here, I hear a presence that is not me and not him but the machine failing to let either speak and either hear. It sounds an empty jam of digital production that is neither his nor mine, but separates us both.

the Exhibition Road tunnel

Sun, 13 Jan 2013 23:44:31 +0000

sounds the geography of its own location in the shape of a dinosaur roar. Children trying their own voices in the tummy of the beast bend its unyielding structure. Visually the tunnel has a certain shape that explains the acoustic properties of its built and outlines the function of its design: to unremarkably direct people in two directions. Sonically it is more complex and confusing, expanding and coming together at different places, giving space and taking it, breaking in and out of a rhythm that has no beat. At one place it explodes, at another it remains firm, sending wheels and feet in all directions. I am listening in passing, passing through the stomach of the beast whose roar is above but reverberates below.

beating eggs

Fri, 14 Dec 2012 15:50:00 +0000

sounds the motion of hitting a liquid into a firm shape. It sounds not the beating nor the egg but the chiming of metal hitting metal through nothingness until the nothingness offers some resistance: the sonic resistance of viscous foam cushioning itself. Vigorously sounding what it beats it slowly changes sound, producing a sonic tautology, the materiality of ephemeral fluff.

The shower drains at the Hotel Grand Terminus

Sun, 02 Dec 2012 23:09:34 +0000

sound a fluid shape. Timorous and soft it moves apart from the harsh and purposeful stream of the shower. Trickling and rolling it gathers around a metal grid that it holds on to and lets go of to drip, slowly and fast, together and alone, into the gully, dinging and ringing on its way. Not purposeful yet necessary it sounds as a thing thinging the relationship between water, shower, drain and drought without speaking its own name. Autonomous and fanciful, ringing and gurgling after the shower has long stopped. Creating discrete rhythms it hangs on to life in the warmth until as a chorus of its own shape it reaches the end of the shiny metal and falls to its death, below, into the invisible space where all sound ends.

the television

Sun, 14 Oct 2012 21:16:53 +0100

sounds a constant of compressed volumes generating a thick immovable form, unbroken and steadfast that does not blend with the auditory space of my perception but superimposes the place of its production. Pressing unresponsive into the room.

Airplanes landing

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 22:10:00 +0100

sound a menacing shape in the dark. Periodically bursting forth from nowhere, to pierce a thin whining line that eventually flattens out into a thick form that covers my space, formless but determined. A small murmur becoming large; a great big dragon fly enveloping my room, expanding its body and imploding its shape to enfold the whole space with the force of its cry, until it moves on, lighter now as if unburdened, vanishing into the night.