synchronized sound plays
Synchronized Sound Plays are recurring immersive listening experiences in which small groups of people are guided through shared narrative experiments using prerecorded audio delivered through headphones. While participants inhabit the same physical space, each listener experiences a distinct emotional and narrative reality unfolding alongside the others.
Blurring the boundaries between performance, game and ceremony, these works invite participants to move fluidly between witness and performer without ever feeling placed in the spotlight.
Part intimate performance, part shared ceremony, the works combine prerecording with live tactile interactions orchestrated by the artist, who quietly tends the evolving experience by placing and removing objects in front of participants. As listeners follow their distinct but overlapping tracks, humble objects— made of masking tape, tissue paper, aluminum foil—quietly appear and disappear before them, accumulating different meanings within each participant’s shifting experience.
star!star!star!circle!
International House of Japan, Tokyo 2015 ·. photo by Michael Lindlow
Star Star Star Circle is a 20 minute synchronized sound play for nine participants seated around a circular table for an experience somewhere between a celestial bed-time story and a séance. Each listener hears a distinct audio track, carefully synchronized so that their stories intersect and overlap.
Each embodies one of Earth’s future North Stars. Through whispered instructions, stories, and reflections on deep time, they are introduced to the particular attributes of their celestial character and guided to interact with the objects arranged on the table before them.
As the narrative focus shifts from one star to another, the participants receive separate instructions directing them to animate objects, perform gestures, and construct ephemeral scenes for the featured listener. Throughout the work, participants continually shift between quiet listener and stellar performer, becoming both the center of the story and the constellation orbiting someone else.
The piece introduces the first round of Jump!Star’s cosmology of characters and reflects on the challenge of telling/living stories that have no real beginning or ending.
Acknowledgments:
Video: Naoki Takeshi
Sound Engineer: Jeff Ruiz
Japanese Vocals: Instructions—Yuriko Miyake · Stories—Reiko Inage
English Vocals: George Ferrandi
Recording (U.S.): Jeremy Scott
Recording (Japan): Jeff Ruiz and Ryosuke Hori
Translation: Toshio Kasei, Shunsuke Hiratsuka, Manami Maeda
Technical Support: Jeff Ruiz, Steven Vitiello, Todd Chandler, Josh Quarles
Production Assistance: U.S.—Keil Troisi · Japan: Sari Hirano, The Programming Staff of the International House of Japan, Nana Kobayashi
Additional invaluable assistance and support provided by Sawako Nakayasu, Manami Maeda, Sari Hirano, Mindy Abovitz, Hiroki Otsuka, the staff of the International House of Japan, the Rehearsal Star Teams, Keil Troisi, and Santo. Special thanks to David “Scout” McQueen for allowing his art work (wooden boat) to be incorporated into the performance.
Made possible by the generous support of the Japan US Friendship Fund
Commissioned by Open Source Gallery, Brooklyn NY 2023 · photo by Stefan Hagen
we are each other’s atmosphere
we are each other’s atmosphere is a synchronized sound play and participatory ritual for small groups developed through conversations with grief counselor Shea Wingate, LCSW. Seated around a circular table, participants wear headphones and listen to a shared audio experience structured around concentric rings of tapered tiles arranged before them.
As participants hear reflections related to the pandemic—moments of grief, disruption, isolation, absurdity, resilience—they are instructed to flip over tiles whenever something resonates personally. Gradually, the sound of tiles clicking throughout the table becomes its own form of collective language: moments when only one tile turns reveal private experiences carried alone, while cascades of simultaneous clicks expose memories held in common.
Described as “Mahjong meets guided meditation at a séance,” the work transforms the table into a temporary structure for witnessing, recognition, and collective meaning-making. By the end of the experience, participants develop personal symbolic relationships to the tiles and reorganize them into new configurations expressing gratitude, hope, and forms of connection that emerged through the shared experience itself.
Harvester Arts, Wichita KS. still from video by Ryan Gates
Developed and performed during Ferrandi’s tenure as the inaugural artist-in-residence at Harvester Arts in Wichita, KS. Special thanks to Kristin Beal and Kate Van Steenhuyse of Harvester, and to Ryan Gates for video documentation.
let me get this out of your way
A synchronized sound play performed for and with an audience of two people who love each other. They sit together at a small table, wearing headsets, both connected and disconnected by what they are hearing.
All the while, the artist / narrator is putting things in front of them and taking things away, tending the narrative and the listeners like a waitress, or like Fate.
Audio in the video above corresponds with track the listener on the left hearing
ok don’t look at the stranger
“In ‘ok don’t look at the stranger…’ two people selected at random sit across from each other at a café table. Each dons a pair of headphones and listens to a simultaneous, yet separate, voiceover. Part audiobook, part instructional podcast, Ferrandi’s voiceovers direct the participants’ gazes from their partner’s mouth and eyes to an array of objects which Ferrandi delivers, arranges, and eventually clears from the table. At the end of the performance, the voiceovers instruct the participants to look into each other’s eyes for an undetermined amount of time. They replicate the endless lovers’ gaze. Ferrandi is interested in how the artist, like a server in a restaurant, administers rituals that in turn become emotionally resonant experiences when the participants become collaborators.”
-Jasmine Dreame Wagner for Hyperallergic