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In making sound in response to the visuals of this room, I wanted to suggest a “scene” that the listener could piece together and come to a personal understanding of. With that in mind, I’d like to only give a few pieces of information about the recordings which may or may not further influence you as the listener. First, on the recordings is a single-manual harpsichord, built in the 1970s. It is tuned in “quarter-comma meantone,” a tuning – that is, a way of determining what exact location in pitch-space each key will be assigned – that was typical of harpsichords in much of the 16th and 17th centuries and which is significantly different from equal temperament, the manner in which virtually all keyboard instruments are now tuned. Given the nature of the tuning and how the human auditory system reacts to certain intervals within it, chords may sound both familiar and unfamiliar to listeners not used to listening in this tuning.

Second, the chords being played are in part derived from a recitative by Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632-1687). Recitatives, found throughout the Baroque era in dramatic musical forms such as the opera or cantata, take on speechlike rhythms and mannerisms but nevertheless retain definite pitch content and metrical rhythm. Within the dramatic form, such speech-like song pulls the drama towards a more prosaic perception; outside of the dramatic form, however, it perhaps pulls one into a more poetic perception of the everyday.

Finally, the two recordings, one on each headset, are identical except that one has two people speaking with the harpsichord while the other does not.

– Sivan Silver-Swartz