Musical works

Dust imagines sound as a lingering memory or momentary mirage we might hold in our ears. I imagine the fragility and lightness of it to be similar to a dust-like substance, floating in the air and accumulating in areas as fine particles of a past matter, a past musical moment.  This piece draws upon my two continual interests in music: the memory of sound and the imagination of sound. In Proust's "À la recherche du temps perdu", the fictitious composer Vinteuil's pieces are described in intimate detail and many historians have mused upon possible real life composers that the pieces are drawn from. As I share Proust's love for late Beethoven I decided to pull my personal inspiration for this piece, and concept of imagined sound, from Beethoven's String Quartet no 15. Working with a few momentary fragments of the work, I manipulated the audio into an imagined version of what these moments would sound like if the sound waves were left suspended in the air indefinitely. Using a radio transmitter and sending these manipulated versions to an occupied channel of my tube amp radio allows a convergence and tension between the competing signals. The oscillation of the signal became the principal inspiration for the musical character of the piece. Musical memories and sonic imagination serve as momentary mirages of sound that arise in our current sonic plane. These musical interruptions rise up and then fall back into their particle matter.