YOUR EAR IS A MICROPHONE, by Cassia Streb
We often mistake microphones for ears when we expect a microphone to hear what we’re hearing when in fact, it does not. Listening to a recording, we think “this isn’t at all what I was hearing!” forgetting that our ears are connected to our brains which filter our sound environment. This piece is inspired by a meditation teacher I worked with who would categorise things as pleasant, unpleasant or neutral. This idea of gathering a list and then classifying the items made me think of how microphones gather the raw materials and then we humans assign qualities to the sounds. .
Cassia Streb is a sound artist who lives and works in Los Angeles, California. She writes music for specific situations and for special places. Her work is often composed for friends and colleagues in order to highlight aspects of their musicality that she admires. Cassia plays viola, small percussion instruments and found objects in her work with improvisation and interpretation of notated scores. Some of her recent projects include Sound House, an interactive sound and puppet piece and Music for Your Inbox, a digital concert platform that presents experimental visual and sound artists.