Cathy van Eck is a composer, sound artist, and researcher in the arts. She focuses on composing relationships between everyday objects, human performers, and sound. Her artistic work includes performances with live-electronics and installations with sound objects which she often designs herself. She is interested in setting her gestures into relationships with sounds, mainly by electronic means. The result could be called “performative sound art”, since it combines elements from performance art, electronic music, and visual arts.
Cathy’s Sounds Unheard Studio Talk series, “Sounds from somewhere else”, explores her work with speakers, microphones, sensors and systems. Over four videos, Cathy introduces a number of her works and explains the concepts and technology behind her creative output.
In the second episode of this series, “A Different Voice”, Cathy looks at how amplification can be used to modify sounds. In her work “In blik” (2008), Cathy plays sounds back through five towers of tin cans to create new sonic worlds. The tin can towers hum, sing, move and shake until they fall apart, becoming ordinary objects once more. “In Paradisum” (2019) explores amplification from another angle, using contact microphones to closely capture sounds being created by the performer and to trigger and control a range of other sounds from Cathy’s laptop.
Join us next Wednesday for the third episode of Cathy’s Studio Talk series. For more information on Cathy, please visit https://www.cathyvaneck.net/.
Tags: Cathy van Eck Composer Composing composition sound art
