Digital Echoes: an “immersive” sound experience

Arts House presents Digital Echoes from October 17 to 20; a concert for viola, percussion and electronics, exploring how sound, messages, and meanings are transformed by time and space.

Created by Aaron Wyatt in collaboration with Speak Percussion, this innovative work merges cutting-edge technology with contemporary classical music and percussive art to deliver a captivating and surreal auditory experience.

Aaron, a proud Noongar, Yamatji, and Wongai man, is not only a violist and composer but also a software developer. 

As Speak Percussion’s artist-in-residence, he is dedicated to empowering First Nations artists to lead their own projects.

“I have all sorts of different things I do, but I’ve been doing more composition work recently. I really just enjoy the diversity of things and being able to flip between these areas,” Aaron said.

Digital Echoes is his most extensive composition to date, offering an “immersive” concert experience that allows audiences to “get up close and personal with the music”.

In this work, fragments of viola melodies are transmitted over the internet to five locations across Australia. 

The captured sounds are then sent back to the performance venue, where they interact with percussion instruments, creating a rich and layered soundscape.

“Most of my other work has been up to 20 minutes, this is a 50-minute piece,” Aaron told North West City News.

“The viola will be in the centre, and there’ll be five percussion stations around that with the audience in between those percussion stations. It’ll be quite intimate.”

This will be Aaron’s debut performance at Arts House, and he is “looking forward” bringing his extraordinary electronic sound to the space and introducing audiences to a unique way of experiencing live soundscapes. •