Please note that this event will be livestreamed on the OTO website. There will be no audience in the Cafe itself.

A live online performance of American avant-garde composer Alvin Lucier’s groundbreaking early work Bird and Person Dyning presented as part of an online LUX exhibition Receiver, Jenny Brady which considers how we both speak and listen, and the question of who has the right and capacity to be heard. ‘Bird and Person Dyning stands as an essential work demonstrating the composer turning inward to the fundamental sparks of aural phenomena.

“Dyning” is Lucier’s abbreviated version of “heterodyning,” a term introduced in the early days of radio transmission to describe the phenomenon of two waves mixing in a non-linear medium to produce two extra signals (created with the sum and difference in frequency). Known as “difference tones” in music, the piece tasks the performer to create the tones with an electronic bird call (originally a Christmas ornament producing a chirping sound), and the feedback created by a binaural microphone and stereo system. The emergence of the difference tones, or “phantoms,” depend on the position of the performer in the space and is, uniquely, music where we actually “listen to a composer listening.”’ Issue Project Room

Presented in collaboration with Cafe Oto to accompany the LUX exhibition Receiver, Jenny Brady 10 September - 30 October