The Hum is a scalable interactive audiovisual installation and live performance instrument. It is a complete world full of sounding objects that interact with each other. It is based on a fictional story of mine, narrated by Simon Dancaster. The Hum currently contains around five thousand musical phrases that I performed and sampled myself.

In creating this work, I was inspired by how we all create our own digital worlds around us that define our everyday reality, influence our mood, and shape our memory. We connect through social media networks, artificial digital platforms that are increasingly becoming their own virtual reality world. We document our lives and collect our memories in unprecedented quality and quantity. In the Western world, technological development has become the central driving force that determines communication, transportation, our work and entertainment, and art.

Below you can see a short teaser of The Hum.

The title, Itara is the Sanskrit word for "another," which is the root of the English "iter", related to the concept of repetition. The inspiration to choose this title came in part from reading Derrida's essay Signature, Event, Context and my fascination with his idea that signs become signs only because they can be repeated.

In composing Itara, I wanted to focus on the superior sound quality from a music technologist's perspective, the sensuality of the sound from an artist's perspective, and the mastery of the technique from a sound designer's perspective. The piece also marks my further exploration of data-driven music, particularly segmentation and spectral decomposition. And finally, I wanted to experiment with and use the gestural nature of my recordings to give the piece a sense of power and dynamics that I know from metal music, combined with my pursuit of formal clarity influenced by my classical music heritage (- a strange brew of childhood influences).

The main creative force behind Itara was breaking down sounds into spectral layers or grains and reorganizing them into musical phrases. I wanted these phrases to have a sense of physicality as well as linguistic articulation. I often perceive music in this sense, and in Itara I wanted to consciously use these notions to create an immersive work.

Immortality is based on the 1000 most downloaded sounds of freesound.org. The concept of the work is concerned with how recording and recontextualization shapes musical meaning. It is about memes, irony, the inheritance and recycling of musical ideas and thus their supposed immortality.