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                    Catherine Clover and Jordan Lacey

                    Test Sites: Round 4

                    Binoculars and a book with pictures of birds
                    Dr Catherine Clover and Dr Jordan Lacey are both sound artists who met while completing their PhDs at RMIT University.

                    ​Cath’s multidisciplinary practice explores communication through voice and language and the interplay between hearing and listening – the vocal, the spoken – and seeing and reading – the visual, the written.

                    Jordan is an urban sound designer, musician and installation artist committed to realising the potential of urban noise. He has recently articulated his urban sound practice in a book for Bloomsbury Publishing titled Sonic Rupture (released 2 June 2016).

                    Both artists have been searching for an opportunity to explore their common interest in urban sound. Test Sites provided the perfect opportunity to initiate their ongoing collaboration.

                    Sounding Batman Park

                    ‘Sounding Batman Park’ saw Cath Clover and Jordan Lacey connecting with the park as participants in a sonic environment, listening for its everyday movements and rhythms.

                    With the aim of discovering a shared avian-infrastructural language, Cath and Jordan initially began constructing a taxonomy of heard sounds. Rather than a hierarchy, they understood the taxonomy as an interrelated sonic network with all components playing an equal and significant part. They began to consider the language of the park as evolving and dynamic rather than static, with the park constantly re-creating itself through sound.

                    The test began with each artist inhabiting their own sonic relationship, Cath with urban birds and Jordan with infrastructure sounds. By the end of the test they became receivers of an integrated sonic environment in which they transmitted their shared responses with the site. Cath and Jordan discovered 14 species of bird sound and 10 infrastructural types, including transportation and construction.

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