Composition | Sound art | Field recording

MATILDE MEIRELES

Sunnyside

Matilde Meireles


Digital release - EP / Research

Released by Crónica Electrónica

June 2020


In a time where human contact was restricted for safety reasons, contact in this work takes place by — literally — listening closely to the sounds of objects which are very much part of my domestic daily life. During April 2020, I collected a series of sounds around my house on Sunnyside Street (Belfast, NI) including a wide variety of textures captured with different types of contact microphones, and multiple layers of electromagnetic interference caused by the growing use of electronic devices and the internet. These recordings formed the basis of an exploration of the micro and extra-human sounds produced by the physical and virtual objects such as the radiator, the kettle, the shower, or the internet. Sunnyside intertwines these elements to reinforce repetition, discovery, detail and loss of perception of time that characterises the experience of many during life in confinement.


Stream & Buy




Research

Sunnyside was included in Matilde's journal article Multiple Perceptions of the Everyday Unfolded: The Case Study of Sunnyside published on the Journal of Sonic Studies.


Abstract: This article introduces the project Sunnyside, an album and composition created using extended recording techniques inside the domestic space of my home during the initial Covid-19 lockdown in Belfast in 2020. While there was widespread public discourse around the ways in which public and outdoor spaces were changing during the pandemic, there was relatively little discussion concerning the changes occurring in indoor and domestic spaces. "Sunnyside" was an attempt to sense, analyze, and represent those changes and examine what they might mean. The following discussion draws on ideas of critical phonography, systems theory, situated knowledge, and interconnectivity to illustrate the project’s refusal of the physical boundaries of the home under lockdown. This critical reflection on everyday routines underscores the project’s relationship with memory, place, and the sonic documentation of everyday personal auditory experiences while opening up a discussion about social networks, both immediate and distributed.


This journal article is part of my larger artistic research on interconnectivity and extended critical listening methodologies for listening with, through and for developed as part of Sonorous Cities: Towards a Sonic Urbanism research project based at the University of Oxford. This includes the album Vanishing Points released by Crónica Electrónica in August 20203; various live performance iterations of the album Sunnyside released by Crónica Electrónica in 2020; Multiple Perceptions of the Everyday Unfolded: The Case Study of Sunnyside, an academic journal article published on the Journal of Sonic Studies in January 2022; Echoes, a wandering concert for the European night of museums at Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine in Paris, a collaboration between SONCITIES and Eric de Visscher; critical listening workshops led by the SONCITIES research team.