Composer Creates Sounds of an Animal Future
Ash Fure, Photo: Steven Pisano
The installation is commissioned by Yale Schwarzman Center (YSC) and is built in collaboration with stock-a-studio. It opens to the public from Oct. 21 to Oct. 28, and marks the YSC’s first week-long installation.
“ANIMAL: A Listening Gym” is both an installation and a live performance. The installation is set up with sonic machines like a circuit of gym equipment. Visitors can connect with sound in the “listening gym” and listen to the creative musical sounds of Fure’s “ANIMAL” performance.
It’s fully alternate reality
Fure holds a Ph.D. in Music Composition from Harvard University and is an associate professor of music at Dartmouth College. Her educational journey led her to test the limits of what sound can do. Early in her career, she worked with more traditional music, such as string quartets and orchestras. But “there’s not really a single icon of that music in this space,” Fure said of the YSC installation. “It’s fully alternate reality.”
That’s because she decided to experiment with sound and create a world of music outside the typical format. To do that, she created intricate and large instruments that she refers to as “sound-making machines.” The machines “are quite accessible in the sense that you don’t have to have studied Bach for 15 years to be able to perform with these instruments,” Fure said.
Fure titled the installation “ANIMAL” because the work focuses on the sensory capabilities humans have. She wants listeners to reflect and connect with the “animalistic” qualities within their human senses, she said.
Turning toward our sensory capacities feels very pressing right now
“Turning toward our sensory capacities feels very pressing right now. That’s where the work you see that I’ll be performing is a highly physical engagement,” Fure said, discussing how, in a world where artificial intelligence is rapidly gaining prominence, she and many others are reflecting on what it means to be human.
“I think that [AI] can crack some light into some rigid senses of what we are and why we are superior, that could really be productive in turning us back toward a more relational frame and turning us back toward a sense of our shared aliveness,” Fure said.
Members of the public can attend the live performances and the installation beginning Saturday. Click here to register.
READ MORE at the New Haven Independent.