“Hirsti-Kvams ‘site-specific city soundwalk’, transmitted via high-definition ear covering headphones, provided one of the most frightening and beautiful explorations of consciousness I have experienced in some time… The programme book promised Hirsti-Kvam’s Hyperrealities would »envelop the participants, raising their awareness of themselves, their actions and their surroundings«. On the evidence of how intensively we listened for ten minutes and how carefully and quietly we walked away, it was a mission accomplished. In a sense, the piece is rampant and opportunistic. In another, it is delicate and carefully considered right down to the composer’s discriminating deployment of his own vocal fingerprint, wrapped in a petal-like Norwegian accent, to offer fragments of information.”
- Andrew Mellor, Seismograf (full review)
Hyperrealities is an outside piece/sound walk for a selected group of around 15-25 participants at a time, which create a type of hyperreal sound world where the real sounds of the environment seamlessly blend with pre-recorded sounds in a way where the listener have problems deciphering one from the other. The participants all wear headphones where they hear the sounds of the actual sounds of the environment recorded by a binaural microphone as well as other microphones placed around the environment, transmitting the sounds in real time along with all the pre-recorded material.
Hyperreality is a term that explains the phenomenon when perceptual reality is seamlessly blended together with an augmented reality so that it is difficult or impossible to distinguish between where one ends and the other begins. Originally a term coined by the postmodern writer and theorist Jean Baudrillard, it has in the latter years been important in the development of new consumerist technology, especially since the dawn of the smartphone at the end of the first year of the millennium. A very famous and recent example is of course the game Pokemon Go developed for smartphones where the player can find and catch virtual animals seemingly “in” the actual environment through the screen of the smartphones.
In a Cagean tradition, Hyperrealities is framing the sounds of the everyday in real time. And while Cage in works such as 4,33 used the concert situation as a way of framing the ambient sounds of a concert space, heightening these to the status of music as well as making us contemplate the characterics and impossibility of actual silence, this work uses technology in the form of microphones and headphones to sharpen the listening act: through an ultra-sharp and highly compressed version of the aural ambient space, along with a voice guide guiding the listener through it, this work is amplifying and trying to open up the listening act itself.
When one hears the live-transmitted sounds of an amplified environment, the awareness of these sounds and oneself as a sound producing agent is heightened. One listens to the environmental sounds in a new way when framed like this, and the interactive aspect of ones sounds actually contributing to this sound world makes the connection more tangible for an audience member. One is a listener and contributor to the music at the same time. This aspect fits the term hyperreality quite well: when amplified and projected intimately into the ears of the participants through the headphones, the sounds of reality suddenly seem even more real than normal, like the ultra sharp image of an HD TV.
In addition to this heightening of the environmental sounds the aim is of course to create an augmented (or even “magic”) aural reality of sounds that could be there (or not) – car horns, traffic, church bells, street musicians etc. – which through careful composition can create a “real-life” Ivesian polyphony of the everyday: the steel drums of a street musician in harmony with a bypassing car or distant church bell – impossible and unforeseeable connections between the real and imaginary, of spaces of present and past, can occur.
