Hearing in Bed was made during the late COVID-19 lockdowns, for an online festival (Foro Internacional de Música Nueva Manuel Enriquez, México City), under the condition that no two performers or two listeners could be in the same room. Eight musicians — four Mexican , four Swiss located in different parts of the world — each recorded their part individually on video.
The work used two types of score sent as digital data to the musicians. One consisted of selected TikTok videos to be used as score and be instrument-synced. (This is the logic of TikTok's Use Audio function — a mass imitation machine that paradoxically produces individuation). The second score is a teleprompter: its the Teleprompter 2 and Antilegos 3 video-score repurposed — musical notation combined with written instructions, leaving space for improvisation.
The audio is the machine side. The body's interpretation is the human side. The TikTok interface is the threshold between them — and the grid recreates that threshold at the level of ensemble.
ONE TEXT, THREE IDENTITIES
The eight musicians share a score but never share a room — the ensemble exists only for the listener, never for the players. Each performer responded to a score in isolation, hearing nothing but themselves. The acoustic field was assembled in the edit and experienced only from the outside. This is one of the strangest properties of the piece: the collective is real, but none of its members ever lived inside it.
SCORE ONE BASED ON TIKTOK VIDEOS
SCORE TWO BASED ON ANTILEGOS 3'S TELEPROMPTER SCORE,
WITH INTERMITTENT TIKTOK SOLOS
The piece is autobiographical. During the months of assembling the material, I was scrolling compulsively — a social media addict, like many others, filling the hours the pandemic had emptied. I was not observing from outside. I was inside the scroll. The lockdown stripped the shared spaces that had been papering over it, and left people with their screens, their tribes, their performance of togetherness.