LISTENING TANK (2024)

Listening Tank invites individuals to immerse their bodies and ears into a tank of sounding water to listen to a durational sound work composed specifically for this installation setting. This work embraces slowness, sensation, and solitude and establishes a level of intimacy and vulnerability with the audience as they listen, soak in, and absorb this tactile and elemental experience of sonic immersion.

Listening Tank is a practice-based research project exploring how touch, sight and hearing can unite to expand the possibilities of listening. The research involves the creation of an underwater amplified sound installation, which immerses the body and ears of a solo audience member in a bath-like object to access a multisensory experience of sound. This tank is used to present an electroacoustic vocal composition titled A Voice, A Breath. By amplifying voice underwater, I investigate the physical relations between sound, water, and the listening/sounding body, focusing on material interactions between these constituents. Thus, physical concerns related to sound are considered through the research question: What can be learned about listening by submerging the body in sounding water? 

This project was created as part of my MFA at UNSW between 2021-24. My thesis is available at UNSW Works