Listening creates an opening

This research explores audio time-lapse as a creative musical tool within site-specific interdisciplinary performance, pursued through the creation of sound score for two major multi-media dance theatre collaborations: Summer, Winter, Spring (SWS) and Listening Creates an Opening (LCO). It was disseminated through multiple performances, installations and public presentations. Ficarra explores audio time-lapse, both as a thing in itself (how best to do it) and as a tool for creating new types of sound score engagements in interdisciplinary contexts. Her focus is on reanimating field recordings, creating processes which mimic visual methods of time lapse photography. A single still photo frame contains a mass of information, but sound takes time to speak – how big a window is required for the ear to make sense of what it hears? What method of reanimation gives a sense of the identity of the sound despite radical compression of time? At what stage do we let go of ‘reference’ and accept sound as an abstract and musical construct? For these two projects, sound was recorded multiple, site-specific urban locations in San Francisco and Troy, New York, and later manipulated using a software “time-lapse engine” developed by Ficarra in Max MSP. Previous work (e.g. Andrew Spitz’s ‘phonolapse’ object) explores live capture of time-lapse audio. By contrast Ficarra’s work uses audio time-lapse as an aesthetic resource for manipulating pre-recorded sound in live interdisciplinary contexts. Experimenting with different sonic windows (from 40 ms to 1 second) reanimated in a continuous stream, Ficarra created fluttering soundtracks that sketch urban and human activity, and co-exist with other musical elements, live video and performance. In LCO, Ficarra further developed this aesthetic by applying the ‘time-lapse engine’ to recordings of musicians featured in the live score, offering a technological re-think of classical notions of stretto