Touch is Sound

Sound is vibration, manifesting, travelling through a medium, like air and atmosphere, but also through dense matter like wood or brick, picked up by our ears and skins and translated into an aural sensation.

In order to make a sound, we need to make something vibrate. We need to touch an instrument.

Hence

Touch = Sound

and

Sound = Touch

“Touch is Sound” could be described as a technique I developed as a way of handling my objects and instruments, by focusing on the quality and feedback of the touch sense, and also on how my body reacts to the flow, the pulses of the stream of music at that given moment.

It encompasses (but is not limited to) unorthodox ways of holding normal drumsticks, using different types of pressure when hitting or even pushing a drum or cymbal, and ways of muting the instruments and objects with my hands and arms.

Both micro and macro movements are made, using my hands on the instruments and also interacting with the room or outside space in a sensitive way.

My hands, arms and body lead the dance!

Besides the joy of letting my body take over the narrative in the moment, this technique also allows me to free myself from an overly cultivated and reduced musical ear.

In this way I can create a dialectic between cultured intentional musical sounds, produced by means of learned traditional and extended techniques, and primarily

non-intentional sounds.

Of course one can cultivate the touches and movements to a certain extent for them to become part of a personal vocabulary. Repetition has that effect. Also, object and instruments demand certain ways of dealing with them. Invite you in a specific way into

a dialogue. Much like any interpersonal interactive play of responses.

How far can I take this touch and dance approach and let the objects lead the

dance? Learn to wait more. To observe more. To really get into the heart of the matter and feel the pulse of an object and deal with it’s Heideggerian quality to want to remain unknown to me.

I can feel how this slowly changes my pulse, my cadenza, my phraseology, my biorhythm.