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While I was working for The Listening Room in 2000 I also made a formal radio poem in tercets, called ‘About Love’. This began as a soundscape for a group art exhibition, in which people with an intellectual disability created artworks in a professional studio space alongside two artists: Bronwyn Platten and John Foubister. To produce the original soundscape, Platten simply asked the participants to talk about love, which they did freely, giving their personal thoughts unmasked.
For the radio poem I then combined these recorded thoughts with music, made from electronically processing an ancient instrument called the lyra, together with sounds drawn from folklore and fairy tales concerning love: footsteps through a snowy forest, a cradle rocking, a spinning wheel, a horse, a sword, a kiss, a nightingale, a flame, a joyful cascade of bells. These elements were assembled into tercets where the ‘lines’ were A sounds, B music, and C voices alternating in a regular pattern: ABC, ABC, ABC. ‘Rhyme’ was achieved between the lines by the harmonic relation of the lyra notes, the storybook feel of the sounds, and the speakers’ focus on what love meant for them. The pattern determined the progress of the work, not any sense of telling a story with a beginning, middle and end. It was a poem, not a documentary.
I dreamed of expanding this experiment with tercets into a radio villanelle of 21 ‘lines’ arranged in a strict pattern with certain refrains. I never achieved it. The space for this kind of work disappeared after the axing of The Listening Room in 2003.

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released July 10, 2000

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The Listening Room Sydney, Australia

The Listening Room was ABC Radio’s premier acoustic art program, broadcast each Monday on Classic FM at 9 pm from 1989 to 2003. The main presenter was Andrew McLennan.
Its producers worked with Australian and international composers, writers, performance artists, electronic media artists, environmental sound recordists and sound designers.
It won an array of national and international prizes.
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