Sound Poem

This piece is inspired by Gertrude Stein’s A Carafe, that is a Blind Glass, which fascinated me by its exploration of the inherent tension in everyday objects and their infinite interpretive potential. Turning my eyes to the kitchen, an intimate and warm space that can embody a multitude of unspeakable relationships, I chose to base the piece on a stanza of Carol Ann Dufy’s Valentine, where the poet uses an onion, a common vegetable, to symbolize the complexity of love———a force that brings not only romantic experiences but also pain and loss of control.

To articulate these metaphors in my sound work, I constructed a parallel between the sounds of a kitchen and those of a private room. The sounds range from the hum of a microwave, the peeling and chopping of onions, the rustling of blankets, to the texture of bare feet on wooden floors. The piece begins within a kitchen setting, underscored by the whispers of lovers. It then gradually transitions into the unpleasant, almost visceral sound of peeling an onion, expressing the discomfort and hurt that love may entail. Noticing a certain similarity between the peeling sound and the rustling of bedding, I used the transition between these two sounds to guide the audience into the subsequent, more tranquil and intimate space—a room where only the cautious, honest sound of bare feet on the floor can be heard. Finally, the piece concludes with the singing of a choir, juxtaposing the sacredness of love against the mundane domesticity scene of cooking. This aims to convey the complex interplay of tension that is both contradictory and harmonious between the two.