adriana sá |
|
| CLOISTER WORKS |
 |
Following an invitation to participate in Dar a Ouvir 2019, John Klima and I created site-specific work for the cloister of the Convento de S. Francisco, in Coimbra: a sound installation called HABITAT, and a performance called MOMENTS OF SPACE.
For the installation we made several sound tracks with field recordings. These are played back simultaneously through ten loudspeakers distributed through the cloister, forming a larger interactive composition. The speakers have been modified with light sensors, so that the volume of each sound source depends on the light capatured by the corresponding sensor. Their visual aspect has also been modified: they became sculptures. For the performance, we created musical vocabulary to interact with the sounds of the installation, and we used six additional loudspeakers. |
|
HABITAT |
 |
This installation invites one to wander around the cloister of the convent, where different sound spaces intersect each other. In one place predominate the streets of Coimbra and the doors of the convent; their emerging musicality is accentuated with instrumental sounds, which are sometimes unrecognizable. In another place, a hand-full of escudo coins thrown to the floor of the church creates percussive moments. In yet another, the cistern bellow the cloister is amplified through a michrophone, rocking the visitor. The volume of the different sound sources is controlled through light sensors that capture the light variations along the day. The soundscape never repeats: it varies depending on the hour of the day, the meteorological conditions, the material architecture, and the specific place where a person is at the moment. |
SOUND SOURCE #1 (street-driven) |
SOUND SOURCE #2 (coins-driven) |
SOUND SOURCE #3 (bass-driven) |
SOUND SOURCE #4 (water) |
  |
   |
   |
MOMENTS OF SPACE |
 |
We also created a performance that inhabitted the Habitat installation, in the convent cloister, with a musical piece that immerged and submerged from its soundscape during the faint of the day. I played my modified zither and AG#3, a software that processes pre-recorded sounds based on the sound frequencies from the zither. John Klima played a long steel wire, capturing its magnetic resonances with a pickup he created from scratch. |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Performance photos by João Duarte. |