World Listening Day: giving a voice to water
This contribution to our World Listening Day project speaks for itself – quite literally!
Bristol artist Ellen Southern has a unique approach to field recordings, employing her years of choral singing experience as she uses her voice to reimagine or reinterpret what she hears – with fascinating results!
Here she’s taken a recording of a dripping tap at different speeds, and worked her magic on it.
“I was interested in how the drips can start off very fast, like a blur, and then over a few minutes, slow right down. This gave me the idea of recording vocal interpretations of these phases of different speeds, and overlaying them.”
“I pitched each voice across an octave of a whole tone scale, a rootless and particularly watery-sounding scale.”
“For me, the result evokes a choir of six ‘water voices’, singing in a strange kind of counterpoint; being interdependent harmonically but independent rhythmically. Listening to them layered this way creates flickers of chance melodic fragments, as they gradually slow and fade.”
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