Babbling / Sounding / Noising Cubes by Catherine Béchard and Sabin Hudon :: November 8 - December 13, 2008 :: November 8; 5:00 pm :: OBORO, 4001 Berri, 3rd floor, Montreal, QC, CA.

The Cubes à sons / bruits / babils (Sonic Cubes) are pleasant-to-touch wooden objects containing a multitude of sounds and composing together an acoustic vocabulary. By holding them in your hand and turning them in all directions, you discover their contents and, in the course of manipulating them, unexpected and unpredictable associations and entanglements occur that you can model as you wish. Sighing, coughing, sneezing, leaves rustling, thunder, car humming, water gurgling in metal pipes, door banging — brief and fleeting stories thus unfold and fold, each time reinvented, starting from a tactile, visual and sound object. Each cube contains an electronic device having six independent channels — on per side — of digitally amplified sound memory and an accelerometer that reads its position. Wireless and energetically self-sufficient, the cubes are multifaceted and multichannel objects that allow for omnidirectional, unidirectional or pluridirectional spatializations.

Visitors are invited to explore and engage with this environment by manipulating the cubes distributed in the space. The order or disorder in which the visitor experiments with these sound objects create individual / collective, linear / non-linear sound paths that constantly enrich one another.

The Sonic Cubes are an exploration in miniature of the world’s immensity and address notions such as inside / outside, open / close. They speak of a memory that forgets, remembers and imagines, and of being here now.

Catherine Béchard and Sabin Hudon form a duo of multidisciplinary artists who live and work in Montreal. Working in the fields of sculpture, audio art and new media, the duo is particularly interested in phenomena linked to acoustically generated sounds/noises, their propagations, the impressions they give as well as the “things” and “empty spaces between things” that compose our perceptual fields. In piling up fleeting tensions between sight, touch and hearing, they endeavour to make audible trivial elements of our everyday microcosm and turn them into a genuine environmental experiment. They seek to occupy space by creating a form of synesthesia—seeing with one’s ears, listening with one’s hands and projecting oneself in a space-time between silence and noise, motion and stillness.

The duo’s installations put into perspective the impermanence and mobility of things as well as our direct presence in the world. They propose a lasting moment where internal time and external time are brought together.

Their work has been shown nationally and internationally.