EARS HAVE EYES // Episode 39
Airing Wednesday, May 14, 2025 at 8 pm MST
on CJSW 90.9 FM, NAISA, & Golden Co-Op Radio
DEVICES FOR LISTENING:
sound sculptures & sculptural sounds
FEATURING:
Franz Ehn
Kristina Warren
Magda Lampropoulou
Manuella Blackburn
Nico Espinoza
Nicole Tanja Fior-Greant
This program is co-hosted by Caitlind r.c. Brown & Wayne Garrett and edited by Caitlind Brown. Thanks to CJSW, Golden Co-Op Radio, and NAISA (especially Kaamil, Claire, and Darren) for supporting the show.
EARS HAVE EYES is a monthly sound art radio program airing on CJSW 90.9 FM in Calgary/Mohkinstsis, Golden Co-op Radio in Golden, BC, and NAISA Radio in South River, Ontario. You can listen to podcasts of previous episodes here.
For our April & May episodes, we’ve been diving into listening devices, sound sculptures, and the objects that mediate the sounds that surround us. DEVICES FOR LISTENING highlights artists who build sonic installations, deep listeners who use devices for amplification, visual artists who work with sound recordings as a material, and composers experimenting with the aesthetics of sound. This month’s program features “instruments” ranging from hearing aids to clotheslines to tomato plants… and so much more!
Thanks to the participating artists and our friends at CJSW, NAISA, and Golden Co-op Radio!
Franz Ehn
Franz Ehn (1995) is an artist and designer. He studied at the University of Applied Arts Vienna from 2015 to 2021. This was followed by features in the Ö1 series Zeit Ton, a nomination for the Guthman Award, performances at the Eyedrum Gallery, Atlanta and the co-founding of DESIGN IN GESELLSCHAFT in Vienna.
LLLAAA is an interactive sound sculpture that explores the interface between body, technology and language. A silicone mouthpiece mounted on the wall, which plays a role in body modification culture, serves here as an instrument for sound production. The movement of a silicone tongue inside the mouth, the resonance chamber, creates a continuous, digital ‘LALALA’.
Speech synthesis and text-to-speech systems are increasingly characterising our everyday lives. Their functionality often remains opaque. ‘LLLAAA’ offers an insight into these complex systems and demonstrates in a fundamental way how text becomes sound.
Simple, repetitive syllables functioned as a universal means of communication that existed before the development of complex languages. The mouth was the earliest musical instrument, even before the invention of the flute. In ‘LLLAAA’, this pre-linguistic sound is digitised and re-contextualised.
Kristina Warren
Kristina Warren is a sound & media artist based on Narragansett land, also known as Providence, Rhode Island [US]. Warren blends acoustic, analog, and digital materials to create a wide variety of work, ranging from synth voyages and digital soundscapes to concertina meditations and beyond — all of which aims to highlight the complex ebbs and flows of individual and collective listening attention. Warren holds a PhD in Composition & Computer Technologies (U. Virginia, 2017) and was recently a MacColl Johnson Fellow (2024) and a Fulbright US Scholar (2023).
Øresund is a piece for concertina and analog modular system. Its rhythm and texture, and its balance of regularity and chaos, are inspired by the 5-mile Øresund Bridge between Copenhagen and Malmö. The beautiful blue vistas from this bridge, punctuated by wildlife, ships, and regular bridge supports, serve as the inspiration for Øresund’s metric and timbral explorations. Synthesized bass lines anchor the pulse but get decentered by the concertina’s fluid gestures. Meanwhile the concertina sound is interpreted through a dynamic feedback system, revealing some of the vast resonant potential of this seemingly humble instrument. In sum, Øresund considers cyclical time itself as a kind of sculpture: complex, multi-dimensional, and non-linear.
Magda Lampropoulou
Magda Lampropoulou (b. 1977 Athens) is a sculptress and sound artist based in Athens, Greece. Her artwork engages with diverse, expressive media including sculpture, audio, performance, installations and video. With emphasis on issues such as discrimination, prejudice, and moral values imposed by a given society, she assumes a humanitarian approach to her work.
About Twist Installation (photo above):
“This audio piece is an excerpt from my playing with the 36 hanging sound sculptures which consisted the main part of my in situ sound installation “twist”. This installation was opened to the public from 10 to 14 June 2024 at the Arts Lounge of the Athens Conservatoire in the context of the Subset Festival (curated by Gasparatos Stavros) and the Athens Epidaurus Festival. Participants were navigated among floating ever-changing in shape and sound sculptures and objects with a feminine accent. The audience could freely touch them and were thus led to discover diverse qualities of sounds emanating from physical contact with the outer shell of metal and paper surfaces and their unseen inner elements as well.”
About Hearing Instrument (photo above):
“Paralleling the title of the artwork ‘Hearing Instrument’ with a ‘Musical Instrument’, I define my hearing aids as musical instruments. By amplifying the sound the hearing aids transmit from their feedback through a microphone, I then process it on the computer and compose it with birdsong, with which it resembles. I design a music sheet based on my audiogram and more specific on the five lines which touch the borderline of my hearing and I identify them with an elastic musical pentagram. Composing the sounds this way, I make an ironic remark on moderate hearing loss, since high frequencies of 4000 – 8000Hz are the ones that a hard of hearing person usually is deprived of.”
Manuella Blackburn
Manuella Blackburn‘s music focuses on intricate details and the clustering and careful arrangement of small sounds within clear, polished sound worlds. Her sound recording of everyday objects, environments and instruments make their way into new pieces through the transformation of the ordinary into the fantastical.
About Home Truths:
“Interruptions dominate this composition, acting as pauses, abrupt stops, moments cut short and held breaths. These moments represent the many interruptions experienced in my daily life, in work, activities and composing. Interruptions are temporal states where continuity is ceased but then resumed or returned to after the interrupting event is over. In this work, interruptions are positioned as the main event; acting as focal points and instances to explore the creative potential of these typically unwanted occurrences. This creative experimentation with many interruptions is set within the context of home life and home sounds. These sounds tell a story, imitating interruptions to flow, being in the home for extended periods and all this entails.”
Nico Espinoza
Nico Espinoza (Curicó, Chile, 1986) is a sound artist currently based in Lisbon. His artwork explores tensions between universal abstraction and local experience through sonic sensibilities and technologies from a critical ecological perspective.
Monstro is a site-specific sound installation made in the context of Animais new media art residency at Casa Branca. This installation emerged from an exercise in situated listening, designed to explore how agencies operating across diverse spatial and temporal scales manifest collectively through a vibrational event. In this instance, a deactivated communal clothesline has transformed into a habitat for small arthropod life forms, inhabiting the hollow interior of resonant metallic structures that respond dynamically to wind forces. The vibrational materiality arising from the interplay of living and non-living agencies is amplified using field recording equipment, generating a dynamic soundscape that encapsulates the interconnected process of mutual becoming.
Nicole Tanja Fior-Greant
Nicole Fior-Greant (b. 1980) is a Swiss experimental composer and multidisciplinary artist focused on sound reduction, patterns in nature, and natural physiologies. She works primarily with acousmatic music, integrating her compositions with video designs and visual art projects. Her works have been performed across Europe and featured in festivals including ARS Electronica, Supersonique Festival, and Festival PAYSAGES | COMPOSÉS in Grenoble.
flux i explores the dynamic interplay of action and reaction within a controlled environment where light stimuli are applied to different solanum lycopersicums (tomato plants). Focusing on spatial, temporal, and frequency interactions, the piece translates these plant signals into an audio representation (bio-sonification). flux i transforms these signals into a manipulated soundscape, creating a layered sound field that reveals the hidden dialogues within nature. This piece is part of a series that gives voice to typically unheard communications, articulating the continuous exchange between the organic and the imposed.
Thank you to the artists & listeners!
Special thanks to CJSW.
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