Artists Statement

Your Hearing Them is a new artwork of wearable technology which allows audiences to
translate their experience to others. Specifically, it focuses on the experience of hearing one’s own voice. The experience of hearing one’s own voice is unique to the speaker. When one speaks, they hear the sound as it reflects off the surfaces of the room, and then returns to their ears — as everyone else does. However, the skull of the speaker is resonated by the vibration of the vocal cords, creating a deeper, and more embodied experience of their own voice.
This additional element causes the speaker to hear their voice differently than how others hear it, and creates the foreignness of hearing one’s voice recorded and played back. That lack of body and bass often provokes a reaction of ‘Is that really what I sound like? What this piece enables is for an audience to experience someone else’s voice — the way they do. This talk outlines the development, design, and production of Your Hearing Them, and will also discuss the wider context of this piece, and the main themes of the author’s PhD thesis.
This piece is one in a series of works that develop a meta-perceptual approach, which focus on the experiential qualities of the audience as a tool for the analysis and creation of new sound works. Specifically, the m etaperceptual approach redirects the audience’s attention back onto themselves through the materials of the work, making the audience aware of some element of their experience and perceptual apparatus.

• Blake Johnston is Wellington based sound artist, currently completing his doctorate in Sound Art at the New Zealand School of Music in Wellington, New Zealand. His work looks at creating a metaperceptual approach to sound art. The meta-perceptual approach redirects the focus of the audience back onto themselves. Instead of using perception as a vehicle for expression or representation; perception becomes the material. His work seeks to identify these meta-perceptual themes that are implicit in other works, as well as create a framework for the creation of new metaperceptual sound works. His work has been performed and demonstrated in Australasia, Europe and America.
• Henry Dengate Thrush was born in Wellington, New Zealand in 1991 and works predominantly in the field of multisensory spatial experience. Henry completed his Masters in Architecture at Victoria University of Wellington in 2015 and is currently working as an installation designer with Story inc. Grounded in a passion for both architecture and music, Henry’s work aims to create immersive, multisensory experiences that alter states of being in order to heighten and alter audience’s awareness of the world they live in. In much of the artist’s work there is a focus on the use of mechanical, reconfigurable, and kinetic elements that augment space and experience.