Field Formations 3 out now

Field Formations 3 represents the fruit of four years of work originating from the field recording based sound installation Reciprocal Synchrony exhibited in Athens, Greece in 2021 for the groundbreaking Reality Check exhibition. The piece was based on loops of a huge brood of chorusing cicadas which I recorded on the island of Paros in 2015. The loops were played from 12 homemade looping sound boxes strategically placed around the room. I was interested in using this field recording because of the phasing effect produced by this enormous group of cicadas. This effect is the result of the shift that occurs as the insects are moving slightly in and out of synch with each other. It is akin a sonic breathing, very different from the beats per minute of the individual insect, which is significantly higher. I was quite surprised to find the beats per minute of this phasing effect to be about 74, which coincidentally is within the normal range of the human heart. This made me consider the similarity of cicadas and neurons- and how bundles of both cicadas and neurons can create meta-frequencies that have somehow synchronized to this common BPM range. I find this fascinating. Is there some common building block of sound or frequency that links species? Knowing that brainwaves can synchronize to external stimuli and that we spend far too much time in the “flight or fight” bandwidth, the objective of Reciprocal Synchrony was to provide an immersive sound experience which through the timing of the loops and the phasing effect, could create a trajectory toward a slower bandwidth where we can relax, be more creative and responsive to our environment.

Read more on Substack here