Synchrony 2013-2021, Lorena Mal. Installation View. 
Synchrony (one day at all times)

Image: Lorena Mal, Le livre de musique/la selección natural (the gap between two beats), 2013-2020, found books, artist frame.

Synchrony (one day at all times) is a live 24hrs online stream available only at commonfrequencies.net, featuring a sound work for piano by artist Lorena Mal (Mexico City). In the work, the polyrhythmic relations are based on the pulse rhythms of different living organisms, human and non-human, setting unexpected encounters and silence intervals, while crossing the states of sleep, hibernation, calm and activity of different bodies through the passing hours of a whole day.  

A section of the piece (12:00 to 16:00hrs) will presented at The Old Stone House, North Garden, in Brooklyn NY.

Synchrony explores various notions of ‘living’ time through the meeting between systems that measure it’s passing, where rhythm is both biological and musical, and tempo, pace or heartbeats are all counted as beats per minute. Combining archival objects, images, modified metronomes, scores and a series of events for 2 pianos and multiple interpreters playing simultaneously different temporalities, the project takes the standard metro- nome as main subject to inquire, and departs from the coincidence between the human heartbeat and it’s limits - both from 40 beats per minute (Grave, or an adult human sleeping) to 208 bpm (Prestissimo, or an adult human before collapse)- to propose another sense of pace beyond a dominant history of human “law” (metronome, metron “measure” and nomos “regulating, law”), based on the heartbeat data of all living organisms found publicly to date on scientific literature, as polyrhythmic relations to experience different bodies across states of sleep, hibernation, calm and activity. 

Disrupting the limits of the metronome and staging tensions of the human capacity of interpretation and perception, Synchrony formulates their own sense of ‘movement’, ‘chords’, and ‘scales’ within a new range to move around that goes from 1bpm to 1511bpm (from a clam in calm, mesodesma mactroides, to a shrew in stress, suncus murinus), among other 356 species in-between, setting unexpected encounters and silence intervals, turning the act of listening into an intersubjective process of reciprocity, even involuntary.

 

**Third Movement: Adagio (calm) in collaboration with Emilio Hinojosa (composición), Lauren Nichols (Department of Applied Ecology, North Carolina State University), Clint Penick (Ecology, Evolution, & Organismal Biology, Kennesaw State University), and Rob R. Dunn (Department of Applied Ecology, North Carolina State University)