Analogue Environmental Sound Synthesiser

with Ross Annels

Floating Land, Lake Cootharaba, Noosa

2019

Sculptural sound work

This work formed as a ceremonial listening structure placed at the edge of Lake Cootharaba for Floating Land 2019. The sculpture acted as an analogue environmental sound synthesiser, mediating between the sounds of the surrounding landscape and the internal rhythms of the human body.

Water movement, wind through trees, distant bird calls and ambient lake sound were drawn into the structure and spatialised through an analogue system. These environmental signals were brought into relation with the sounds of the human vascular system, including heartbeat and circulation. The work did not treat these as separate sources. Instead, they were folded together into a shared acoustic field where body and environment could be felt as one continuous exchange.

The structure functioned as a prosthetic for listening. Participants approached, leaned in, and placed their bodies in proximity to the listening horns. Sound was not presented as spectacle but as contact. A quiet, immersive bodily synthesis with the lake, the air, and the shifting weather of the site.

The sculpture acted as a mediator between biophony and the individual human biome. It brought into awareness the already-present circulation of sound through water, air, tree, body and ground. Sound was treated as a connective tissue rather than a signal moving from one point to another.

This work carried forward an earlier sculptural piece made in 2018, This is the sound of me loving you. In that small hand-formed work, clay was moulded around the artist’s hand and fingertip pressure was applied slowly and with intention. The resulting form resembled both a hand and a shell, emitting the internal sounds of the body when held to the ear. The Floating Land work extended this intimate scale outward into the surrounding environment, allowing the lake itself to become the resonant body.

Across these iterations, the work explores material as memory carrier, sound as relational current, and the human body not as an isolated receiver but as a conductor for environmental messages. Listening becomes a form of contact rather than observation.