I have always had an interest in sound. Starting with the music my father, a devoted Mozart aficionado, would so often play, I grew up hearing music around me. I started to experiment with creating sounds of my own, first by creating the strange language of sounds that my brother and I would use in our conversations, then moving to organ lessons and playing trumpet in school. This lead me to studying acoustics and speaker building to listen to my ever expanding collection of music.

Though I played music in the Western tradition for many years, I was not inspired to write in this tradition. The sounds that heard in my head didn’t work within this system, so I didn’t pay it much heed. I began to explore other creative outlets. In college, while studying photography and sculpture, ideas about sound began to creep back in. I began to envision, instead of the fixed, silent image, capturing characteristic moments with motion and sound.

The discovery of computer music brought me back fully to the realm of sound. Suddenly I found a musical realm with the power to express these sounds I had always heard in my head. As I explored this new medium, striving to recreate these internal sounds, I felt the influence of the my other studies creeping in. In order to make the sounds relevant, I felt there needed to be a physical component. I was able to bring these ideas together starting with the Dark Passage event, The Feast of the Ascension.

By creating a soundscape for a section of New York’s first aqueduct, I was able to take my impressions of the space and express them with sound. The sound then created the mood of this particular interaction with this space, thereby making the experience of the 20 or so participants more of a shared experience.

Further work with Dark Passage and the founding of Ars Subterranea has given me outlets to further explore this idea. For each group, I did a multi-channel sound installation which created very different impressions of the space suited to each event. Dark Passage events have small groups of participants who take part in elaborate games, so a intimate experience was called for. Ars Subterranea’s Inaugural was open to the public with many hundreds of visitors, so the experience was an entirely different one.