Murmur

BACKGROUND Michel Serres (Genesis, 2009) offers an account of `the multiple¿ based on a metaphysics of noise: 'it's neither a flock, nor a school, nor a heap, nor a swarm, nor a herd, nor a pack...It's a bit viscous perhaps. A lake under the mist, the sea, a white plain, background noise, the murmur of a crowd, time'. Sound as multiple is the one and the many, the general and the particular. It involves the physical, perceptual and conceptual. These are sounds that cannot be apprehended distinctly or completely by any one listener, that cannot be clearly and simply defined, individuated. Sound, however, is not often heard as multiple. Listening frequently serves as a process through which a sound is differentiated from the noise of the world and addressed as discrete and specific. This is as much the case with music and sonic art as it is with everyday sounds.
CONTRIBUTION Murmur presents sound as multiplicity, creating a listening space in which to hear sound as plural, spatially dispersed and noisy. The installation generates constantly shifting `pink¿ noise - like that of a crowd, traffic, the sea: sound that is at once many things and nothing in particular. The work draws listeners into the multiplicity of sound, demonstrating the limitations of addressing sound as a discrete object. SIGNIFICANCE Murmur is an innovative sound art work that eschews the treatment of sound as an art object and instead encourages open listening practices that reinterpret the listener¿s position in the gallery space and relationship to the work. It was co-presented with Liquid Architecture and opened at RMIT Spare Room gallery on July 14 2016. Exhibitions in the gallery have an average attendance of 600 people. It was promoted in Art Almanac and Art Monthly as well as online and a catalogue was produced for the exhibition. It is supported by a number of events, including floor talks (August 1 and 2) and a public panel presented in association with Liquid Architecture on August 11.