Sonic intervention

Auricula Suum and Auricula Alium rearrange the relationship between ears and body as a way to bring subjects into their sonic bodies. As Julian Henriques asserts, ‘[s]onic bodies produce, experience and make sense of sound.’ Sonic bodies are phenomenal bodies that are attuned to the auditory sense. They take into account the temporality, spatiality, transience and propagation of sound. They are present and listening; thinking through sound.

In Auricula Suum, a single subject wears binaural microphone-headphones that are connected to sending and receiving radio packs. The radio packs send the signal captured by the microphones to a laptop running a Max/MSP patch that processes it before sending it back to the headphones: varying delays cause dislocation between physical location and unfolding sound events, and the swapping of left and right channels draws attention to the sonic implications of orientation.

In Auricula Alium, any number of participants wear binaural headphone-microphone headsets, which, in conjunction with a software patch, allow each individual to hear through the ears of others. The Max/MSP patch takes the multiple pairs of input signals, each corresponding to an individual participant, and re-routes these to the headphones of others. In this work, the movements and interactions of one participant define the hearing of another.