Auris Festival # Sound Installations
A live broadcast from Auris, Manchester’s first festival dedicated to sound art in all its forms, bringing together some of the most distinctive voices in contemporary sound art through a range of practices that explore immersive listening, the environment, architecture and space, technology, and the body.
Featuring installations, performance, spatial audio, talks, workshops and sound walks across Manchester’s Oxford Road Corridor.
Developed by Modus Arts, Auris Festival brings the dynamism of the sonic arts to Manchester in a festival format for the very first time, making the city a new destination for the art form.
Resonance Extra broadcasts live a selection of performances and installation from the festival:
Auris Festival Co-Curator Vicky Clarke presents four extracts of sound installations to be found across the festival site throughout this weekend. We begin with ‘T1/2 (Half Life)’, Vicky’s own collaboration with Kamila Narysheva a multichannel sound installation that explores the acoustic memory of the Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site in Kazakhstan through field recordings of soil, water, air and architectural remnants made in December 2024.
We continue with ‘Seven Sisters’, a participatory multichannel installation by fellow Co-Curator Wajid Yaseen, incorporating vintage test tone wide range oscillators to be adjusted and manipulated by the audience to create square and sine wave crossings. The installation is an act of listening effectively activated by the listener as they move around it and indeed you’ll hear participants engaging with the oscillators over the fifteen or so minutes of this recording made earlier today.
We then cross to the festival’s Spatial Audio listening room delivered on Bernard Steer’s Microcosm System - though obviously we can only broadcast a rough impression for the works in a stereo broadcast. We’ll hear Arconic’s ‘The Quiet Work Of Trees’ and round the hour off with ‘Lull’ by Mick Harris, before returning to our live festival broadcast.