From 22 to 26 June 2022 my audiovisual composition Neap Tide was installed at the Sheen Center in New York City as part of the 2022 NYC Electroacoustic Music Festival.
Exploring the deep interrelationships between periodicity, number, and time, Neap Tide is for four channels of live-rendered audio, twelve channels of environmentally-reactive analog video, and one channel of digital video.
The visual dimension of Neap Tide is generated by custom-built circuitry of my own design.
Installed as part of the work, these circuits react dynamically to audiovisual stimuli to generate real-time electromagnetic variations.
In oceanography, a neap tide marks a moment of equilibrium between the sun and the moon, when the gravitational forces exerted by balance out, and global variations in water flux are at a minimum.
The goal of this work is to induce such a state of equilibrium in those who experience it by drawing consciousness towards sympathetic resonances between wave phenomena of light and sound.
It does this in part by modulating a live-feed video stream of the installation environment, with cameras transforming their subjects according to abstract ratios and periodicities.
In this way, it develops the practice of a “sound bath” — a meditative experience in which a series of harmonically-related frequencies are droned in a reflective space to induce a state of heightened vibrational awareness.