Water Pail is a sculpture and sound art installation about the artist’s Donna Chang’s intersectional Chinese-Australian identity and her mother’s and her maternal grandmother’s life in Hong Kong during the 1960s-80s. The music is an immersive 8 channel haptic sound artwork responding to the stories and sculptural objects. Many of the water pails in Hong Kong during that time were repurposed cooking oil drums. The work explores their historical significance and sonic potential in an 8-channel array of these drums, each containing transducers that vibrates and distorts the surface of the metal.

Water Pail

Music performed live by Ensemble Vertixe Sonora at Atle Schmiede Vienna, Austria, June 2024. Maria Mogas Gensana (accordion), Pablo Coello (saxophone), Nuno Pinto (e-guitar). Video art and music by Daniel Portelli

Supralateral

Sound and the More-Than-Human World Cloud Pulses

Incoherencies define our experience. Systems that are undefined, with fluctuating edges, Just as meteorologists attempt to make sense of storm systems (Lin 2022), insects too must navigate the chaotic “sensory noise” of their environments (Halfwerk and Slabbekoorn 2015). Is it possible to examine an anthropology of incoherency? (Pinho 2023) Can we learn from the interspecies responses to 'sensory incoherence' (Halfwerk and Slabbekoorn 2015; Kunc et al. 2014). For instance, humans are naturally incoherent to a bee or a flower. We are not making “sense” in the ultraviolet spectrum (Koski and Ashman 2014).

Weather events like the Madden-Julian Oscillation are sonically mapped, reflecting the tropical disturbance of clouds, rainfall, winds, and pressure (Lin 2022). Native grains (like wattleseed and kangaroo grass) are used to simulate storms. Native perennial grasses increase soil carbon and animal and plant diversity. They require less resources and have micronutrient benefits (Pascoe 2018).

The ecological artwork of sonifying incoherence use aeoliphones, custom-made seed chimes, in a micro-climate deluge, bouncing on surfaces. Incoherence is an integral part of living and non-living systems (Halfwerk and Slabbekoorn 2015). ‘Cloud Pulses’ is about systems outside anthropogenic ways of knowing, interspecies processing of incoherence, the importance of First Nations practices, and decolonial perspectives (Pascoe 2018).

Audio credit: Daniel Portelli (voice, seeds, bird whistle, balloons)

Bibliography

Halfwerk W and Slabbekoorn H (2015) 'Pollution going multimodal: the complex impact of the human-altered sensory environment on animal perception and performance'. Biology letters, 11(4).

Koski MH and Ashman TL (2014) 'Dissecting pollinator responses to a ubiquitous ultraviolet floral pattern in the wild'. Funct Ecol, 28: 868-877.

Kunc HP, Lyons GN, Sigwart JD, McLaughlin KE and Houghton JD (2014) 'Anthropogenic noise affects behavior across sensory modalities'. The American naturalist, 184(4), E93–E100.

Lin H (2022) 'The Madden-Julian Oscillation'. Atmosphere-Ocean, 60(3–4), pp. 338–359.

Pascoe B (2018) Dark Emu. Scribe Publications.

Pinho T (2023) 'Tim Ingold and Object-Oriented Anthropology'. International Journal of Anthropology and Ethnology, 7(1).

Cloud Pulses

Performed by Alana Blackburn 
Composition by Daniel Portelli

Dream Recorder

'Whale dream recall' from the piece 'Whale Fall' composer Daniel Portelli

Whale Dream Recall

Watershed

A co-composition with mangroves and with members of The Music Box Project. This project inquiries into the relationship between cinematic art and how we experience ecology, engaged through concepts of the dispositif, opsigns, sonsigns, heterotopic coupling, and other deep embodiment practices.

Journal of Embodied Research 
Special issue on Ecologies of Embodiment, 2023 https://danielportelli.com.au/what-the-river-doesnt-say-about-itself/

Musc on boats

The Ghost Cave

Lucid dream sound cue

The spiralling growth patterns of plant tendrils are reframed as musical lines.
Charles Darwin spent hours each day simply watching young cucumber plants grow from the pots on his windowsills, observing how they explored the world around them.
Grow a cucumber from a seed and observe and notate its growth pattern, then when it has matured assign the shape of its tendril to a parameter or multiple parameters in the music. Using metal springs, weave the music around the weave of the tendril.
Consider how the wind, gravity and “sleep” behaviours of a plant has affected its shape. Consider how the music could show these forces and influence the sweeping circles of time.

Tendril Helices

Hyperbodies (2015)
for computer controlled piano (RHEA)

Premiere: 25 October 2015, Phipps Hall at the University of Huddersfield, UK.
Made as part of a workshop at the University of Huddersfield run by Prof. Peter Ablinger and Prof. Winfried Ritsch, 19-25 October 2015.

Information about the work:
http://danielportelli.com.au/hyperbodies

Hyperbodies

Lines of Fragmentation (2015)
for trumpet, trombone, and two percussionists – 6’03”

Premiere: 17 February 2016, ESMUC Ensemble L’Auditori in Barcelona, Spain.
Conducted by Premiere: 17 February 2016, ESMUC Ensemble L’Auditori in Barcelona, Spain
Conducted by Lorenzo Ferrandiz Carrillo

View score -
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PuorYAAKEkuGryRae8k62qpYtOs7zt_n/view?usp=sharing

Lines Of Fragmentation

Memory Tape (2015)
for ‘cello, trombone, and recorded media – 11′

Premiere: 5 February 2015, Stephen Menotti (trombone), Ellen Fallowfield (‘cello) St Pauls Hall at Huddersfield, UK.

View score –
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1APpfs-PRNjBNvHtTIXMWqbKFJMgWLDWY/view?usp=sharing

Memory Tape

Part of a larger work for horn, oboe, bassoon and electronics
https://danielportelli.com.au/the-three-ecologies/

The Three Ecologies - electronic part

composer, sound artist, intermedia artist

Daniel Portelli

Popular tracks