Sao Paolo Biennial

I will be performing “The Sharawadji Effect” as part of the Practices of Attention Symposium at the Sao Paolo Biennial on November 18.

Certain sounds request or demand attention: sirens, church bells, a baby’s wail, a phone’s beeps and ring tones; others slip below awareness, technically perceptible but excluded from consciousness: the rush of traffic, the hum of air conditioners, the murmur of distant conversations, wind in the trees. Daily life in urban centers brings us into acoustic relation with innumerable sound sources we can only partly identify. How can we relate to this disordered order? As described by Jean-François Augoyard and Henry Torgue, the “sharawadji effect” is a feeling of plenitude created by the contemplation of a soundscape of inexplicable beauty, in particular an aesthetic experience of the sublime of everyday cacophonies and unexpected silences that defy classification. Across the performance of the The Sharawadji Effect, specific elements of acoustic attention and sonic rhetoric will unfold. What counts as foreground and background, signal and noise? How much can we hear simultaneously? Beginning with simple sounds and periods of silence, the audience will be led towards an experience of the sharawadji effect in relation to the hyper-complex acoustic environments we all live with daily.

A remixed version of the text, “Sharawadji Mix,” can be read here.