Study for Underwater and Language

_Editorial

_{Notes from Underwater}

_{With this post, The Eaves get submerged.}

_{The featured piece is a notational experiment that explores what happens when human language is literally out of its element and goes underwater.}

_{The nexus of water, sound, and language is strangely evocative: It brings to mind John Cheever’s short story “The Swimmer“, Annea Lockwood’s river soundscapes, the stunning complexity and eerie beauty of marine mammals’ communications.}

_{Study for Underwater and Language interweaves the loneliness of the human in water, the wish to communicate, and the fascination of water as a sonic medium in a way that is both playful and exacting.}

Study for Underwater and Language (2015-2016)

This work engages with the human language, its meaning and poetry, its potentials and limitations as well as the need to express and communicate. It plays with the distortion and perception of sound, the abstractedness and coding of language; obscuring these by fitting them into the sonic realm of water.

Given the limitations of the anatomy of the human vocal tract and the apparatus implicated in vocal expression, as well as a natural unnecessity for humans to communicate vocally in the realm of water, the notion of exploring an “impossible” realm for human language to occur in is essential for this piece.