One striking response to COVID-19 comes from the composer and intermedia artist Ash Fure, who has won notice for her sensorially engulfing sound environments, including the installation-opera “The Force of Things.” The prospect of creating works that could be heard only via streaming technology, with its compression of data, initially challenged her. She hit on the idea of composing an electronic piece that would pass into an acoustical environment assembled by listeners at home. After experimenting with various possibilities, she became fascinated by the sonic properties of Mason jars, which, when held up to the ears, act as filters, blocking certain sounds and highlighting others. The ghost ocean that we all heard in conch shells as kids is a related effect.
The result was “Interior Listening Protocol 01,” an eight-minute video piece that appeared on an online program by the International Contemporary Ensemble. The listener, equipped with a pair of Mason jars or tall glasses, mirrors movements that Fure makes in the video, for which Leah Wulfman supplied a hypnotic visual design. The audio component is a gradually mutating field of electronic noise, with deep bass tones periodically intruding. As you move the jars toward your ears, the general wash of frequencies drops out, and a shimmering spectrum of isolated tones emerges. When the jars cover your ears, the booming bass predominates. As Fure later explained to me, “Your skull becomes a kind of contact microphone—you’re hearing through the bones of your body.” I had my computer hooked up to speakers, through a digital-audio converter, and with the volume cranked up high those interior pulsations became disconcertingly intense. Fure had achieved her goal: far from being attenuated by digital transmission, her piece delivered an experience so vivid that I almost felt the need to lie down afterward.
Alex Ross, "Under Pressure." The New Yorker, 7/6-7/13/2020.
