THE WORLD ACCORDING TO SOUND — LIVE!
The World According to Sound at Gray Area, San Francisco, on August 26, 2021
The Performance
We set up a ring of loudspeakers, pass out eye masks, turn off the lights, and move sounds all around the room.
You will hear bridges and ants and the gurgle of mud pots. You will be transported inside another person's head, and back in time a hundred years to the streets of Berlin. You’ll fly out into space and bore deep inside the bowels of the earth. There is a musical washing machine, sonorous sporting events, and the disturbing howl Marco Polo heard while crossing the Gobi Desert. There's absolutely nothing to see. It will be a spectacle entirely for the ears.
For the live show we set up a ring of eight loudspeakers around the audience, and then we take the sounds from our radio show and move them all around the space. We do live narration, but we talk very little, just enough to tell you what the sound is and to give each one a bit of context. The sounds are mixed so that each speaker can be individually controlled, allowing us to move sound to different parts of the room. So a tennis ball can fly over your head from one side of the room to the other. Ants can scurry in and out of different speakers. And the cables of the Golden Gate Bridge can twang and thrum on all sides.
The show is about an hour long and everyone sits in the dark with eye masks that we provide. We normally perform for around 150 people at a time. The upper limit would be around 300 people. The ideal space is a squarish room with moveable seating. We arrange our eight, free-standing speakers in a square around the audience, and it is optimal to have at least five feet from the speaker to the nearest audience member. The only equipment we’d need from the venue is a PA system to do our live narration.
Universities are inviting us to campus to guest lecture classes, put on the show for the student body, and hold a public Q&A afterwards. In some cases we've workshopped students' audio/radio work instead of some of the guest lecturing. We've worked with a bunch of different departments: media studies, journalism, music, documentary/film studies, and student activities boards, which have all chipped in.
