In Idle Mode (Noise) thematizes the ambiguous politics of noise as an intangible entity. The work started with a field recording of the fishponds’ sound ecology and translated the recording with computational tools into a musical piece for seven singers from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in Shenzhen who were asked to interpret the musical piece. These singing voices, as recordings, are playing from a “swarm” of horn loudspeakers that hover above the ground as if they were insects hovering above the fishponds. The sound that they emit is ambiguous as is the original field recording – In Idle Mode (Noise) is thus a poetic approach to the distinct sound ecology of the fishponds through the technology of translation/transcription from recording to sound writing. The horn loudspeaker used to play the singers’ voices may or may not visually point to the ambiguous aesthetic of public sound: it may remind us of its use in public space, and yet it is capable of producing a thoroughly poetic sonic experience quintessentially made of human voices.



Photos: (c) 2023 Marcel Zaes