When mirrors face each other, the objects reflected in them become smaller and less distinct until the mirrors seem merely to reflect themselves. An echo is differentiated by being made of (one or more) distinct and discrete repetitions of the original sounds. Aural mirror is an installation, which tries to immerse the listener in the echo’s of their own sounds. It is not only a mirror in the metaphorical sense of reflecting (sounds) as a mirror but a psychoanalytical sense of the sonorous womb. As the listener enters the installation the ambient sounds of their movement and voice are picked up by the microphones and played back into the space. These repetitions of sounds are reflected within the space until they abstracted into a drone. This drone devoid of any signifying content keeps looping back on itself. This opens up a space in which the listener hears first an acoustic impact, followed by echo effect, followed by clear out-of-phase sounds. Psychoanalytically, this series of moments renders how the fantasy of sonorous enclosure can only be heard in retrospect. That is, only after hearing voices split away from one another can we imagine their having once sounded together.

 

After the above-mentioned splits and before the end, the fantasy of sonorous envelope consists both in the listener's hearing intertwined and indistinguishable "sounds" and the fact that we know that one is stationary (as if deaf), the other mobile and listening. Listening subjectivity is produced as the listener joins the configuration; he/she is stationary, like the recorded sound, but while the recorder is deaf (it can only speak), the listener is mute (we can only listen). The unison between visitor and the installation at the beginning of each of this piece presents the listener with a fantasy of sonorous oneness; as the visitor and recorder diverge, we hear a clear acoustic mirror as one sound literally echoes another. This initial unison- followed-by-divergence is heard as if from the listener's position from within the imaginary order with its binary categories of listener, on the one hand, and immediate perception of sound, on the other.

 

Aural Mirror also explores the sonic possibilities of the timeless continuum; it is intended to steal your sense of time from you, that it slows time, that it achieves a balance or merely a state where sound floats and stands still at the same time, its effect being to drown your own self into a real-time oblivion. The layering tones over each other in increasingly dense structures and require a very high volume level, following in the footsteps of La Monte Young in wishing to envelop the listener in sound so that liminal harmonic relations are experienced from within the sound what Douglas Kahn terms as “listening inside sounds.” What is important about this is that by thus enclosing the listener within sound, the listener is unable (aurally) to leave the auditory space of the piece and thus able fully to experience its most essential dimension, namely time. The installation creates an illusion of the sonorous envelope through very repetitive and metrically regular fragments, on the one hand, and irregular entrances of sustained pitches, on the other.