Yashaswini

These are a few sound epiphanies: notes made on my phone while working on sound projects.

• A project can begin by listening.
• To listen is to notice what is present, absent, and just beyond perception.
• What surrounds speech is also part of what is said.
• Silence is not empty; it has a history.
• The unheard can organise what is heard.
• Background is never only background.
• The frame has an outside.
• A place is larger than what can be seen of it.
• Not everything has a sound, but anything can become sonic material.
• Everything has a sound. Sometimes you have to touch it to hear it.
• Sound can move attention without telling us where to look.
• In an anechoic chamber, the body becomes audible: a heartbeat, blood flowing can sound like a river.
• The Tamte is a drum made of leather. Its skin remembers dalit history; when struck, memory becomes sound. Its beat does not ask permission to be heard.
• Sometimes, it is the smallest disturbance that rearranges the whole field of listening.
• To equalise noise is to enter into a politics of appearance: to decide what emerges, what recedes, and what remains concealed.
• Under the pressure of EQ, noise acquires texture; texture, in turn, begins to speak as an instrument.
• Remove the expected sound and something else begins to appear.
• Sound can contradict an image without cancelling it.
• A sonic idea can come before a visual one.
• A sonic idea can become a visual.
• Listening is not what happens after making.

Learnings from Tamte:

• Tamte is a drum made of leather. Its skin remembers dalit history; when struck, memory becomes sound. Its beat does not ask permission to be heard.
• A sound made in the place of segregation can become a way out of it. The Tamte carries the memory of the labour imposed upon it, but its beat gathers what caste has worked to keep apart.
• The Tamte teaches us that sound cannot be made obedient in the same way as a body. It may be summoned into service, but once released, it travels elsewhere.

Gekiyasu, a collaboration with Jacqui that started at the Royal College of Art. We began by collecting, recording and experimenting with sounds — field recordings, objects, surfaces, voices, machines, micro-electronics, rooms and things whose sounds we were curious about. The name, meaning “extremely cheap” in Japanese, was a playful combination of our names, Jacqueline and Yashu, and gradually became a way of thinking about how we worked.

A lot of this work came from a fascination with the relationship between the eye and the ear. We became interested in what happens when sound is allowed to remain unresolved — when you don't see the thing that is making the sound, and the ear has to invent it. Sound could locate you in a space, but it could also dislocate you from it. It could make a body appear without showing a body.

This led to a series of experiments, performances, recordings and sound works: from field recordings and improvised instruments to Man in the Eye, a narrative sound album; from small listening situations to sound cinemas and live performances. The work moved between research, music, sound design, installation and storytelling.

https://yajasuki.wordpress.com/

I invite you & The hidden story

In 2021, Arianna Zuanazzi, a neuroscientist, and I were paired through the Imagine Science Film Festival to develop a work together. This became I Invite You, a science-inspired short film exploring the challenges of listening to language. The brain is constantly trying to make sense of what it encounters - connecting fragments, filling gaps, interpreting signals and finding meaning even when information is incomplete or unfamiliar. We became interested in this act of understanding as a form of resistance: an insistence on making connections where they are not immediately given.

Using image and sound, the film plays with this process of meaning-making, asking the audience to actively construct what they are experiencing rather than simply receive it. The film was shot inside one of Bangalore’s last remaining single-screen cinemas and won the Symbiosis Competition at the Imagine Science Film Festival in 2021.

We are now developing The Hidden Story, an installation based on Hans Christian Andersen’s The Emperor’s New Clothes. Rather than telling this popular story directly, the installation breaks it apart across three panels: visual information is translated into audio description, foley recording methods and music composition. The work draws on research into how the brain combines information from different senses, and how memory and expectation shape what we perceive.

The story is therefore hidden within its own making. The audience is given documentation of these audio post-production methods to join them together. What we remember is never quite what was there; a play between memory and reconstruction. We are curious whether the familiar story will return as it was remembered, or whether, given only one aspect of building its audio, the brain may make another story. 

For This hole is a half-dream of a dune, the work follows the various holes and openings within Marwan’s space, recording and animating the sounds that move through them. These become points of departure for tracing acoustic connections beyond the immediate architecture—to the walls, the street, the neighbourhood, the city, the Noord-Zuidlijn, the earth below, and the water-filtering dunes of Amsterdam.

The work brings sounds at the threshold of audibility into the foreground, attending to what is often overlooked, marginalised or pushed to the periphery of perception. The holes function as both physical and conceptual openings, leading from the surface of the space towards deeper geological, historical and metaphysical layers.

Live and uncontrolled sounds emerging from Marwan are brought into dialogue with recordings made at the Amsterdamse Waterleidingduinen. Through this process, distinct environments begin to overlap, producing an expanded acoustic space in which architecture, city and landscape become porous.