Noise Fields

About

Machines pervade urban environments; Noise Fields treats their sounds as material for performance. The production combines field recordings of machines with improvised percussion and live electronics. Recordings were collected from electrical and mechanical systems in buildings and urban machine sources encountered during a residency in Sherbrooke, Canada. The sonic materials (drones, buzzing, machinery noise) are merged with found-object percussion activated live in changing configurations. The performance draws on prior projects by Colin Frank (including a site-specific installation titled Humming, Vibrating Architecture) and uses a custom-built controller described as a ‘Truncated Tetrahedron’ to manipulate field recordings in real time. The production situates machine noise as posthuman performances and reimagines urban spaces as acoustically inhabited environments.