100'000hz - new sound work

100'000hz

Score & performance
Exhibited in online exhibition Composite by the Numbers
https://compositebythenumbers.com/lisa-hall/

Many thanks to curator Dayang Yraola for this invitation!

At this devastating point in the pandemic, this work 100'000hz sounds out the the number of people who have died each week in the UK due to covid19, as an attempt to understand these awful statistics. Starting from March 2020 when the first person died, to the latest weekly total of 7507 deaths captured in mid January, these numbers are compiled in an 11 piece score that I perform in a short video.

In the performance, each number is sounded as a frequency - to hear these death in hertz. Working from a field recording taken during the early days of the first lockdown, each frequency is drawn out and emphasised. Through this the statistics become audible, found in our environment. The peaks and declines of the pandemic are heard and the cumulative effects build to fundamentally change the sound of that spring sunny morning.

See the whole score and watch the performance on Composite by the numbers:
https://compositebythenumbers.com/lisa-hall/




About Composite by The Numbers
Tracks the statistics of covid around the world and over the year.
Curated by Dayang Yraola. With works by: Auspicious Fam, C-drik, Chris Brown, escuri, Jai Saldajeno, Laure Boer, Lisa Hall, Mary Katherine Trangco, Makoto Nomura, No one pulse, Pauline Despi, Teresa Barrozo, Tintin Patrone and Tugtugang Musika Asyatika.

New normal is a world that has shifted into irreversible discomfort, fear and all sorts of hideous ness that were dystopic possibilities we thought once could only happen in fiction. And constantly, it requires us to rethink our footing on this present trembling ground. We have now been reduced to statistics. We are numbers of those who have been infec ted. We are numbers of those who have been killed. We are numbers of those who have been saved. We are numbers of those who are collateral damage. We are numbers of those who are beyond reprieve.

Every day we are bombarded with numbers. At one point, these numbers were just too many that people already fail to recognise that each number represents a LIFE. Although in these statistics 1 is just 1 out of 100,000, for a real person that 1 could be a mother, a sister, a daughter, or self.