a day ago
Rising festival 'sound experience' Saturate asks audiences to jump in a pool
It's not every performance that requires an audience member to strip down to their togs.
So, from the outset, Saturate, an underwater musical "experience" on during this year's Rising festival, establishes that it's little bit different.
Picture 60 or so people together in a public pool — the historic City Baths in the centre of Naarm/Melbourne — serenely sharing what is usually a very active space.
"Your ears need to be underneath the water to hear the sound composition in its full frequency spectrum, which means that you need to be either diving under the water or floating on your back," the show's creator, sound artist Sara Retallick, says.
Retallick, who has produced and performed different underwater listening experiences — including at Rising 2021, and Brunswick Music Festival — says her underwater composition presents a "really different way of listening".
"We're geared towards imagining sound [under water] to be quite muffled, [for example] if you were to listen to a radio that was submerged in water or someone singing or talking under water.
"But because I'm using underwater speakers that are designed for this process, the clarity of the sound is actually really quite incredible."
She's deliberately used instrumentation that couldn't acoustically be performed under water — "air-reliant instruments" like flutes or voice, and electronics — which she presents under water with clarity.
Some of the sound is also recordings of water.
"It's designed to get people thinking about whether they're hearing the sound composition or hearing the water around them. [It's] sort of playing with reality versus recording.
"So it's this very different encounter with sound."
Retallick is keen to ease her audiences into the show, which "starts in a fairly gentle way".
Front of mind is that she's asking her audiences — disrobed, submerged in water — "to be in quite a vulnerable position".
"That's definitely something that has a been a theme through all of these underwater works that I've made, is that that care for the audience is really important and the whole journey becomes part of the work.
"So, of course there's the sound work itself, which is the main thing, but then how people move through the venue and through the change rooms and all of that, I also consider a very big part of the work."
To refine her compositions, she jumps in a pool herself, to test scaled-down versions of the sound. She's even found an "Airbnb for pools" so she can use a private pool for a few hours at a time to listen as her audiences would.
"A lot of my compositional process uses sound and digital processing to create quite unique sounds and I've really thought about — listening under water myself and getting a sense of what sounds work quite well and what sounds don't work as well and what frequencies respond well under water."
The process of making the work has presented plenty of things to think about that she wouldn't have had to consider if she'd presented her composition in a concert venue or other "normal music venue".
"So there's all of these considerations that come into play."
Saturate runs for 24 minutes and 37 seconds, which is a very purposeful duration: it's the same duration as the longest breath held under water.
And, for Retallick, seeing bathers-wearing audience members experience it in a state of deep, focused listening is a joy.
"[It's] incredible for me as a sound artist because that's what I was hoping to get out of this work; to present something that would encourage audiences to really tune in.
"And I guess the gesture of inviting people to actually fully submerge their bodies in water in order to access the sound means that they're committing a lot to the work, to being able to experience that listening."
Retallick has discovered, over years of practice, that something very particular occurs in audiences' bodies during her underwater shows.
"I came across this realisation that we listen really differently under water. So, when we're submerged in water, in a pool or in the ocean, we listen through bone conduction hearing. [That] means that the sound vibrates through the skull and the bones in our skull, and the jawbone, rather than passing through the ear canal as it would if you're listening above water or through air.
"So that gives the sound this very close quality. It almost sounds like it's inside your head and we sort of lose the directionality of the sound, so it's like the sound composition is coming from all directions at once."
Saturate is on as part of Rising festival, running June 14-15.
