Stay Tuned

A Polyphony of Tuning

Stay Tuned: The Polyphony of Tuning

Stay Tuned: The Polyphony of Tuning stages a global act of collective listening and sounding. Rooted in my larger research on five modes of listening — noise, resonance, polyphony, cacophony, and silence — the work focuses on polyphony as a way of listening to multiplicity and simultaneity.

Participants across the world hum a single tone, typically lasting as long as a breath. These tones may be repeated or offered once, producing a rhythm of presence and absence. Participants tune either to one another’s voices or to a shared reference frequency: 1000 Hz, the universal broadcast alignment tone. They may also find a related tone within their own vocal range, allowing the signal to be embodied in registers closer to human capacity. What emerges is a drifting polyphony of convergences and divergences, constantly shifting in and out of tune.

This project extends directly from Drift Choir (2025), a month-long transmission system linking Athens, New York, Berlin, and Bogotá. That work emphasized presence over clarity, privileging interference, atmosphere, and environmental sound as expressive forms of communication. Stay Tuned distills this framework into a single act of voicing, where the broadcast tone of 1000 Hz becomes a fragile point of orientation.

As operator, I mix and record the transmissions in real time. Playback is layered into the live broadcast so that voices coexist with their own echoes. Timing, delay, interference, and pitch shifts inherent to radio are not corrected but embraced as compositional forces. Overlapping voices form temporary alignments and unstable harmonies, sustaining both fragile resonance and persistent dissonance.

Stay Tuned explores transmission as a structure for connection, phonetics as embodied sound, and dissonance as a condition of relation. Breath, tone, and signal reveal the fragility of human and technical systems alike. Radio here is both medium and metaphor: it enables simultaneity while carrying delay and disruption. To “stay tuned” is to make the vulnerable effort of holding resonance together — fleetingly, imperfectly, but collectively.