“No longer for ears…..sound which like a deeper ear, hears us, who only seem to be hearing. Reversal of spaces. Projection of innermost worlds into the Open…..”
Rainer Maria Rilke
Artist Statement
I began my career as a composer in the late 60’s. What really started to interest me was not only the music that I could write, but the states of mind I would experience when I felt musical enough to compose. In those moments all the sounds around me also became musical. This new hyper awareness came about when I became internally quiet enough so that my own silence became a portal to my musical imagination. As a result, I have devoted myself to creating sound sculptures that explore the act of listening as a way of making music.
My interest in this evolved with a fascination for the phenomenon of sympathetic vibration, such as when you have two identical tuning forks and you strike one, the second one vibrates.
Latent in the physical structure of everything, are resonant frequencies. This results in everything around us having the potential to become secret resonant ears that are harmonically echoing everything surrounding it. I began to explore this phenomenon using high resolution vibration sensors called accelerometers. These may be placed onto and inside of a wide range of structures and situations that then map, render and reveal the silent echoes latent in a structure or an object that is echoing a live soundscape.
SOUND SCULPTURE WITH RESONATORS at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1978 was a large scale sound sculopture created from a collection of resonant objects placed in the surroundings of this museun, transmitting the live harmonic echoes from these objects "listening" to downtown Melbourne to the sculpture garden of this museum.
In the mid 80s when I moved to Japan, my curiosity led me into the sonic underworld of large hanging Buddhist temple bells. I began making recordings of them and discovered that the seemingly silent bells were actually echoing with sound. This was an inspiring experience because the recordings were not only remarkable, but there was also an impressive synergy with the mystical associations of the sound of silence and the idea of a bell that was secretly ringing. This culminated in my first Silent Echoes exhibition in 2009, at the former Haunch of Venison Gallery in London with audio/video recordings of 5 historic Buddhist temple bells from Kyoto
The silent harmonic echoes of everything are resounding in the physical world. This fact has been an ongoing source of inspiration, leading me on fantastic imaginary acoustic journeys into the secret soundscapes created by the resonating harmonic echoes latent in everything.
My method of exploring this hidden sonic dimension has been with high resolution vibration sensors called accelerometers. When these sensors are mounted on objects or structures in an active soundscape, they reveal the soundscapes harmonic dimensions.
Large silent hanging bells have been amazing objects to explore as harmonic listening devices. I have explored this phenomenon with Buddhist temple bells in Japan and China, and a variety of silent bells in Europe and America.
In 2022, I created a large scale sound sculpture called Silent Echoes Notre Dame which was my artistic response to Notre Dame’s terrible fire in 2019. I had noticed that Notre Dame’s two bell towers were not damaged and that they contained 10 bells that became silenced by the effects of the fire. I installed accelerometers on all ten of these bells, which could be heard on the terrace of the Centre Pompidou with the live sounds revealing that these silent bells are secretly ringing all the time.
As I came to learn about the 2025 Roman Jubille initiated by the Vatican, I became very interested in creating a sound sculpture with the Vatican’s most famous and seldom rung bell, the Campanone, using sound design techniques I developed with Silent Echoes Notre Dame. Last November, I came to Rome with a brilliant sound engineer from IRCAM in Paris, with whom I had worked closely in the Notre Dame project. With his help, I made extensive accelerometer recordings of the Campanone’s internal vibrations that are excited by the ambient soundscape surrounding Vatican Square and St Peter’s Basilica. I have created a sound sculpture from these recordings that is currently installed in the Portico of St Peter’s. The design of this sound sculpture uses a 12 loudspeaker system from Meyer Sound that is spatially distributing a floating and shimmering sound cloud from the Campanone’s secret harmonic echoes. The presence of this acoustically transparent sound cloud interacts with the scale and acoustics of the Portico’s architecture, while creating imaginary acoustic visions for visitors.
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An Imaginary Acoustic Vision of the Campanone Listening to Vatican Square
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