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Humancicada (work in progress)

Humancicada at Est-Nord-Est, 2019
Coding by Marcel Smit
Production support by Est-Nord-Est
Funding from Mondriaan Fonds
Photograpies:©Est-Nord-Est, artists residency / Jean-Sebastien Veilleux photographer

 

Humancicada at Inter Arts Center,2019
Coding by Marcel Smit
Production support by Inter Arts Center
Funding from Mondriaan Fonds

 

 

 

It is a project to make several types of participatory sound sculptures. The audience is invited to try unusual voices in the sculpture, which would turn into a live performance in an exhibition setting. One sculpture would be like a recording cocoon or like a karaoke helmet. It would have a headphone to listen to cicada sound and a mic to record the participant’s voice. As an exhibition setting, there would be several sculptures and speakers that mixes and accumulates everyone’s voice synched with the cicada. This project goes back to a time when I got a shotgun mic in my bachelor study, which enabled me to focus on a single cicada. Normally cicadas are appreciated if it is far away, and if they are like a crowd in the background. It would be too noisy if it were singing next to us alone. The microphone enhanced my hearing. The single cicada sounds inspired me and I started imitating it, which freed my voice.
In the normal life we mostly only use a certain voice that we learned as a right voice, which the society has told us. We sometimes need to unlearn that. After I left an art school, I got stuck because I could not make noise in the city, so I sung in a car, or I went to forests by the car to look for a place where I could sing. I looked for cicadas and I imitated them many times.
I collected the sound files of both cicadas and my voice imitating them in front of them, and with these I have made a multiple speaker sound installation in the past, to show the accumulation of my activity.