Artist Statement

A disclaimer: “Truth Within Earshot?” is not an easy work to digest. Granted, the concept and the form are direct, the framework is clearly laid out, each performer does what they are supposed to do. It is not an easy work to follow, primarily because we live in a difficult time. An epoch in which values are being challenged, beliefs crumpled, the world rendered increasingly unintelligible. It is not easy because, in times like these, we deal head-on with our own perceptions. We grapple with the way we have learned to look at things instead of the things themselves. Nothing we do these days is easy. These are the thoughts that troubled me for many nights. I assume they trouble you as well. 

Preceding the perception of “truth.”
During those nights, I would often conduct a series of personal investigations and exercises: I would listen to the ambiance while jotting down what I heard. Some nights, without any specific reason, I heard music and patterns emerging from a sea of white noise, I hear memories, I hear Beethoven’s late string quartet. From the ambiance, I hear myself. In moments like those, the sounds as they actually are have little bearing on how I experience them. This is a fluxion, a transformation of perception that links my past and present. From reduced listening, the external world and my own perceptions meet. 

Time, Duration | Music, Sound
Music encapsulates a set period of time. Each piece of music is a meticulously crafted box within which emotions, narratives, colors, structures, and forms are unraveled. Sounds (in the broadest sense) signify duration: they don’t run on “clock time”, and they existed long before anyone was alive to hear them. Sound exists regardless of intervention. The clock only starts to tick when a listener intervenes. Without the listener, it is merely a process or duration, like water that percolates through layers of sand. 

To listen to sound or music appears to require two sets of ears. (In Chion’s term, two different “modes of listening”) But what if the two are inextricably entangled, and the entanglement forces us to relinquish the “frame” that tells us what music is supposed to sound like? When does the transformation happen? 

The erasure of these signifiers reveals the fluid and transitory nature of these distinctions. The transformation is equivocal, and the divider between these modes of listening is ambiguous at best. It is not a scientific discovery but rather phenomenological. When the synesthesia happens, the images evoked by the presence of sound are ephemeral and fleeting; it draws from the deepest depths of one’s psyche. It tends to arouse nostalgia and dark images; they are private, unspeakable. 

The matter of importance is that noticing the transformation speaks volume about a person’s way of perceiving. (I cannot predict your visual association when you hear the sound of an ice cream truck, to some, a fond childhood memory, for others, a scene from a horror movie involving malevolent clowns) What do you hear when you hear noise? What is noise, and by extension, what does “this” or “that” do? What narrative does “that thing” suggest? Is there a political meaning, or is it just a cog in the grand scheme of things? These are symbols that draw no obvious answers; these are Wittgenstein’s private language. 

Sound is concrete, and it draws reference to the object that makes the sound. Music (by traditional standards) is not. Musique concrète composers use this transformation as a point of departure to discuss the necessity of the distinction. I use it as a point of reference to look at the way we perceive. In listening, I discover my own rhythm: a clock within me that ticks and tocks of its own accord.

Truth?
“Truth Within Earshot?” then, is about the understanding of perception. It is a work built on ruins, bodies, and memories. To forego and accept the way we perceive things is to look into our past in a different light. It is a process of shedding but also one of rebuilding. It is set in motion by the frontal collision with a fragmented, nonlinear world that has never been as apparent as the recent past and the immediate future. Through this fragmentation and disintegration, I collect shards and can look, in a different manner, at how I “perceive”.

It is also from these shards that I can make new creations that are not constrained by the shackles of the past. The “elephant in the room” is a world we don’t see; the rhinoceros in the next room is a ghost of the past. It is only when the ghost is exorcised, the room eventually emerges.