Ash Fure’s 'ANIMAL: A Listening Gym' Connects People to their Deep Sensory Capabilities

Sound is an intrinsic part of human sensory experiences. Ash Fure, a sonic artist, has created a hands-on experience for people to connect with their animal side through sound.

For the first time, Yale Schwarzman Center presented a week-long interactive art installation, Ash Fure’s ANIMAL: A Listening Gym. Fure in collaboration with stock-a-studio built sound-making machines in The Dome where visitors could tap into their animalistic sensory capabilities.

Throughout the week, Fure performed live using her sonic machines to create a wildly unique sensory experience for guests. She performed on a custom gym rig at designated showtimes, and a team of listeners worked the circuit with the crowd. During performances, Fure took the audience on a journey surfing sound waves. With pulsating rhythms made by moving and riding seemingly everyday objects against sound waves moving at different speeds, Fure catapulted the audience into a new sensory experience where they could hear and listen with every part of their body much like a highly attentive animal in the jungle. The Dome with its non-linear, active acoustics became a key part of the unique experience. As audiences emerged from the performance words like “otherworldly,” “breathless” and “full-body experience,” could be heard. 

Band and string students from Cooperative Arts and Humanities High School and their teachers, Patrick Smith and Henry Lugo, visited The Dome Friday morning to experience the sound machines and get a lesson in using and bending sound waves and different frequencies. As Fure explained the art and science of her listening gym, the students sat with rapt attention and were eager to jump in and give each machine a try. “In our advanced music classes, we teach about sound waves and music acoustics, but this is a tactile experience for the students that takes the theory into hands-on learning,” remarked Smith. 

Fure also participated in Dancing about Architecture: Resonant Bodies, where she was in conversation with MIT architecture professor Xavi Aguirre and Yale School of Architecture visiting critic Deborah Garcia. She discussed the creation of instruments, how sound affects the body, and what the future of sound and music is.

“I have been slowly migrating away from Western instruments. I have been making more multisensory, more immersive work in the workforce,” Fure said. “This is the first time that I've actually invited an audience to actually touch anything. And it's a real experiment, we very much consider this an act of social research.”

In a time where artificial intelligence is growing in its capabilities and its use, Fure shared how ANIMAL: A Listening Gym presents itself as an urgent interactive experience.

“I'm fascinated by the emergence of these large language learning models and artificial intelligence. Theories are out there arguing or were insinuating that these artificial intelligences are going to force us to reevaluate human exceptionalism,” Fure explained. “There’s a sort of Western hubris…through our hyper rationality, through how smart we are, how fast our cognition can work, and now we're being vastly outperformed in that cognition and vastly outperformed in those types of cerebral intelligence.”

With these cognitive capabilities that AI has, Fure explained that connecting to the senses is what distinguishes human experience. Sensory capabilities are humans’ prowess, so the Listening Gym is an experiment that helps people return to the inner sensory abilities that connect them to the basis of reality.

ANIMAL: A Listening Gym was commissioned by the Schwarzman Center. Fure’s engagement was part of Yale alum Bryce Dessner’s multi-year residency as the inaugural Artist-in-Residence in Music, in collaboration with extraordinary musicians, artists, thinkers, and doers at and beyond Yale, and produced in partnership with ArKtype / Thomas O. Kriegsmann.