RIFT
(In development)
“The Earth is not a fragile flower. It was here before us and will be here after us, and it will not notice our absence.”
Edward O. Wilson
How does the experience of listening change when music is encountered as an environment that can be entered and navigated rather than as a fi xed timeline? RIFT is an ongoing large-scale sonic environment designed to investigate this question through an immersive architectural installation built from environmental recordings collected in Iceland. The project transforms space into a navigable field of sound, vibration, and light composed of glacial activity, geothermal systems, underwater tectonic movement, atmospheric phenomena, and magmatic processes. These materials are organized as a layered temporal ecology in which radically different timescales coexist: magmatic durations measured in millions of years, glacial movement across thousands, atmospheric events unfolding in fractions of seconds, and human musical time. The work examines how such temporal strata can be perceived simultaneously and how spatial sound can compress deep time into embodied experience.
The installation functions as both artwork and research instrument. Sculptural acoustic elements, large subwoofers inside large wooden/paper structures, and spatial audio systems translate environmental recordings into tactile and architectural interfaces that extend listening beyond the ear. Vibration operates as an accessibility layer that allows deaf and hard-of-hearing audiences to experience the work through the body while also expanding how hearing audiences understand sonic perception. Architecture is treated as a compositional collaborator that shapes rhythm, circulation, and attention.
The Music
The digital music version of Atargatis functions as a non-linear sound environment. Each playback begins differently, with all tracks starting at independent points, ensuring no two listening experiences are the same. A multichannel mixer allows listeners to navigate between layers, translating the act of wandering through the library into an interactive online form.
Creating Atargatis
The process of creating Atargatis grew from my thesis research on music as an environment. I approached the fragmented myth of Atargatis as a chronicle that needed to be rebuilt, and the Fleet Library became the natural site for a newly formed narrative. The work began by listening to the room itself. Its aisles, shelves, and long reflections behaved like an underwater landscape, so the composition emerged from the way sound naturally travels through the space. This shaped the two pitch ecologies that form the musical core. Each ecology has its own cluster of pitches and rhythmic behavior, and the two drift through one another without settling into stable harmony. Their instability mirrors the shifting nature of a chronicle reconstructed from fragments.
To support “performers” inside this environment, I created two graphic notation systems. The Breath Stones score presents pitches and dynamics as stones rising and dissolving across a sand field, with register and intensity encoded through shape, size, and opacity . The Wave Score expresses the second ecology as flowing lines that behave like currents, guiding the performer through changes in articulation, motion, and brightness as waves cross the play line . Both systems allow the performer to inhabit the environment rather than follow a fixed path.
Reading the story became another way of entering the space. Visitors hold a printed booklet and read the reconstructed chronicle while walking through the sound field. The act of reading inside the library, surrounded by moving pitches and shifting harmonies, turns the myth into something lived rather than narrated. The digital version continues this idea by reshuffling the starting points of all tracks so that each playback begins in a different state. The listener is always entering a world already in motion, just as the chronicle itself continues to rewrite and rearrange itself through sound, space, and presence.