Isoladrone2020 from Touch: Isolation by Anthony Moore

Given the theme of the project, the idea of the piece is to evoke absence. At the very outset the sound of the piano is divorced from the instrument itself by recording not with microphones but through Gibson Firebird pick-ups. With its strings free to vibrate and tuned to the key of the piano chords, the guitar is strapped to the back of an upright piano. All sound of the room it's in, the ambient space, is effectively eradicated.

A further distancing is achieved through drastic filtering of the recording. Middle and high frequencies, known to introduce 'presence' (in sound engineering jargon), are entirely missing.

The absence of presence becomes the presence of absence and produces a sense of deafness, of being isolated from the world.

“Auditory space has no favoured focus. It’s a sphere without fixed boundaries, space made by the thing itself… It is not a pictorial space, boxed-in, but dynamic, always in flux, creating its own dimensions moment by moment”. Edmund Carpenter

From R. Murray Schafer's book "The Soundscape, Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World" (Destiny Books, 1977)

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