Poste Audio Centre Clark

<The Desk Lab>

Ambient Box no.1

2022

wood, contact microphone, guitar string, spring, elastic band, metal objects

102 x 54 x 86cm

Photo Credit : Paul Litherland <Centre Clark>

“The Desk Lab” is a participatory sound project that involves listening, thinking, reflecting, and making. It is composed of a sound work and an interactive noise box. The listening station is transformed into a laboratory where audiences can explore and add sounds to the audio work, entitled Water and Dreams, in real-time. The desk resembles a musical instrument as it has the sound-making objects—strings, springs, and elastic bands—built onto it. Audiences are encouraged to play with the objects and explore its auditory effects. The contact microphones connected to the desk deliver the sounds through the speaker.

Water and Dreams is a six-minute-long audio piece made from field recordings and samplings of underwater sounds from streams, rivers, and the sea. It is accompanied by narration and breathing sounds at intervals that get shorter as the narrator submerges deeper. Water and Dreams is an audio sensory experience of inner thought reflections and of going inside of oneself.

Audiences discover sounds on their own and react with the introspective sound piece in a meditative process of self-reflection.