Faculty of Art

Integrated Media

Elliott Larson-Gillmore

The Hand that Chooses

The Hand that Chooses is a soundscape composition using every-day sounds like hammering, car horns honking, bike bells ringing, sirens; handmade sounds where there is distinctly another person in the environment producing chosen (implicitly or explicitly) sonic contributions through their apparatuses. Six speakers are distributed around the perimeter of a room. Sounds are arranged in gradually looping, overlapping, and additive patterns that slowly emerge out of a simple field-recording. Increasingly complex structures are formed as sonic space moves from natural to composed.

“We can listen to the human hand as a generator of sound in the environment, where the everyday person is imagined as a kind of composer of their own life-musics. Listening is equally a composing activity. By doing selective attunements and listening, one can play compositional games with the sounds that occur in their environment.”