performative sound installation for vocal identities & IKO 3D-audio

Using an omnidirectional headset and the IEM Granular Encoder plugin, in this work, I zoom in on small speech fragments carrying phonemes and sibilant sounds to create non-existing prosody, which is then projected into the space through the IKO. The signals I feed into the IKO intentionally delay for 1-4 seconds before the IKO plays them back with randomized sound beaming. While the live voice interacts with its fragmented duplicates in a dynamic, ever-shifting dialogue, I continually shape this interaction, lending rhythm, structure, or musicality to the voice and its spatial echoes.The spatialised sonic textures are picked up by the omnidirectional headset and played back through the IKO again. This feedback loop between my voice, the sound beaming, and the space becomes a crucial part, with the space itself participating in the performance as a resonant body that shapes the vocal performance. The space itself becomes an instrument, with its natural reverberations amplifying and diminishing certain frequencies, while my voice becomes inseparable from the inherent acoustics of the architecture in which it resonates. Significance lies not in deciphering what is being said but in responding to what is being heard. The listener is invited to engage with the sound as a phenomenological presence, where I’acte de dire expresses nothing but itself, signifies nothing but the voices own existence.

What follows is the act of me distancing myself from the headset and projecting my voice more directly into the space. This act represents a reclaiming of human agency in vocal presence in the face of external systems in control. Although the semantic meaning is lost, the significance of being unamplified, unprocessed, and bare—confronting IKO directly—becomes striking, crucial, and perhaps even poignant or moving.