https://www.instagram.com/p/CueU4qMq_Y5/
Linked above are videos of the installation.
Dafna Naphtali has been working with multi-channel sound compositions since 2001, and her audio chandelier works have been presented since 2010.
The most recent audio chandelier, Passeri (2023), created in the Toolkit-of-care research residency at Platforme Intermedia, is a four-channel video and ten-channel audio installation commenting on bird migration, climate change, and bird song.
The relationship between audio and visual in this piece is interesting to me due to the number of sources for each – four visual sources and ten sonic sources. Why has Naphtali made this aesthetic choice? I suppose it might be because the audience would be overwhelmed by more visual stimulation than four screens, but the ten sound sources imitate a busy acoustic arena with various sound objects that could be experienced in a natural environment.
Video guides the audience’s ears when the sound may be abstract, things that have similar sonic qualities to bird song (perhaps voice manipulated with effects) may not convey the same meaning without a visual guide. Perhaps the hectic bird-like vocals are the most symbolic of the ways in which birds are endangered by climate change and how danger to the birds health could be noticeable to humans by a change in their sonic qualities.
The composition is a site-specific, continuously changing generative piece created using Max for live, MSP, and Jitter. The multichannel installation’s placement above the audience seems suitable due to the nature of the context it exists within. The composition consists of field recording, live sound, and granular synthesis sending individual grains to different speakers with slight variation between them, such as pitch and speed. The composition is aleatoric, meaning it is
based on chance, the piece will never be the same twice making it immersive for the live audience. The field recordings used within the composition are a combination of Naphtali’s recordings, public-domain audio of birdsong, and live recorded/ processed vocals. Naphtali uses a “point source” method to spatialise the composition, treating each speaker as an individual instrument.
How the audience experiences the installation has aesthetic relevance relating to the subject of the piece, deck chairs are mostly found outside and are commonly associated with the coast, the coast is commonly associated with birds such as seagulls – These choices that Naphtali made encourage the audience to feel as though they are bird watching or connecting to the natural environment.