Tom Zear

Unite hEAR!

Statement:
Unite Here! Unite Hear!
Unite Here! Unite hEAR!
The sound of trouble, the sound of treble.
Listen to the people, listen to the silence.
We must be heard, hEAR our cry.
We are loud, we are proud.
We cannot be silenced!
Don’t be bias, we are human too.

“Silence In The City”
Sound and music exist only through time and silent pauses that are part of it. Even if the silence is less than a millisecond long, it is essential for hearing the separation of the notes in a musical composition or in a sound arrangement. The importance of silence for sound or music is substantially less explored than sound itself. “Silence In The City” is about the possibility of finding silence. It is questionable to experience silence in a city today outside the wee hours between 2 and 4 am. Zear, along with Wolf Gowin, will produce in a room a “silence room”, a room within a room that will be dark. The darkness will be contributing to the sensorial experience, emphasizing the aural perception. This experiment will show the participant how difficult it is nowadays to experience true silence. They hope to achieve a room/place of quietude within the otherwise noisy soundpedro 2018 installations. In that sense it will be a contrapuntal sound installation. The participant will be seated in the dark “silence room” behind a closed door. Perhaps there will be waiting lines for others to get into the “silence room”, therefore, the time in this room will be limited to 1 or 2 minutes. Due to the experience in the sensory-deprived room, the participants will realize when they come out of the room how noise our present-day environment has become.

Zear presents two pieces at soundpedro.

instasoundgram2017 is a Interactive, self-sustaining soundart piece. Every SoundPedro visitor has the control to this sound piece. Via Instagram, there are a collection of posts (soundvideos) to view and listen to at your convenience as you travel the event. Imagine the broad scape of this idea being executed during an event like this!

In CMC City Meets Country he, along with Wolf Gowin will be applying digital and analog sounds, as well as live sound to describe the difference and similarities between urban and rural settings. As the sounds clash and collide with each other, we hope to achieve a sense of oneness. City and country are increasingly different from each other, not only political, as we can experience today; but the soundscape seems to increase in the cities whereas the country demonstrates a decreasing noise level. In the tradition of David Tudor and John Cage, we are playing both soundscapes at the same time, looking for the silence to come.