Yara Asmar - Sighs II

In this track I’m using a metallophone, bowed and struck, and the vibrating brass reeds of the accordion. A while back I was having a conversation with one of the professors in the expanded media department at Alfred University, Andrew Deutsch, about vibratory potential and what it means to listen for what metal itself might articulate when set into motion. I told him I’d always been fascinated by metal and its sound properties, the different timbers that can be extracted from the material through bowing, plucking, rubbing, striking. He called this “sitting inside the sound”.

And yet, even as it rings out, the sound is never fully stable - frequencies shift, overtones emerge unpredictably, decay bends in unexpected ways; there is a sense that the material is responding, not just passively resonating, but actively shaping its own sonic afterlife.