SPORE SCORE
audio, 16 mins, 2021
In Spore Score, Emergency Chorus collaborate with sound designer Alice Boyd to contemplate the inner life of fungi. Fragments of text from wide-ranging sources percolate, whilst an ever-changing soundscape emerges from music improvised using the guidance of a spore print.
Inspired by John Cage’s Indeterminacy, the texts are selected and ordered randomly from a bank of options, and the music created separately, each part recorded in isolation. The resulting sound collage mines elements of chance, audio processing and environmental data to explore the fruitful collaboration between humans, fungi and technology, asking how we might listen in new ways to the natural world, and how it speaks to us under jeopardy.
Spore Score is the first iteration of a continuing project which will later see the use of DIY hardware to translate plant and fungi bio-emissions (the electrical currents they produce) into MIDI data interpretable by audio software, in effect allowing mushrooms to ‘improvise’ music.
Spore Score was created with commissioning support from The North Wall as part of Alchymy Festival 2021.
Created and performed by Clara Potter-Sweet, Ben Kulvichit and Alice Boyd, after Indeterminacy by John Cage
Composer and editor Alice Boyd
Violin Ben Kulvichit
Dates
3-31 May 2021 / Alchymy Festival, North Wall Arts Centre (online)
