radio transmitters, jammed radio signals, natural phenomena
created for the “Music of the Natural World Exhibit” at the Cornell Music Library
exhibited from February 20th to March 20th, 2026, at the Sydney Cox Library of Music and Dance at Cornell University
special thanks to Cornell Libraries, the Cornell Council for the Arts, and Backslash for their support of the project.
Grayspace Opening Remarks
2/20/26
Good afternoon everyone, thank you for being here. My name is James Parker, I’m a composer and a sound artist in the graduate program in composition here at Cornell. I want to start of by thanking Lenora Schneller and the folks at the music library, as well as the team in the music office, for all of their support over these last few months to make this project happen, and also to thank the Cornell Council for the Arts and Backslash for helping fund the installation. The experience of art is so rarely the result of one person’s labor, and I am eternally grateful to those around me for their work in making this day happen.
It might seem like a strange place to begin a talk about a sound installation, but the fact that I am a Tango dancer is, in a way, at the foundation of this piece. When people find out that I dance tango and that I am composer, the inevitable next question is if I have written any tango music. I have not. For a long time, I saw my tango life and my artistic life as relatively separate, but in recent years I have begun to understand the threads between them. I don’t write tango music, but my work is about the same things that tango is about: Non-verbal communication, intimacy, community, and a kind of listening that is closely connected to the body, and an awareness of how those bodies move through space and are influenced by that listening.
Grayspace, the installation that opens today, is an environment for corporeal listening, focusing on the connection between our sense of listening and our sense of movement, or perhaps said more accurately, our physical sense of self. It allows participants to physically navigate a space by listening, exploring the interactions between sounds as they are encoded into radio waves, transmitted throughout the library, and jammed against each other, creating and complicating the relationships between the sounds and spaces we hear them in, through interference, attenuation, diffraction, and obstruction.
At first, the listening apparatus may seem familiar, if a bit retro: many of us use headphones to listen to prerecorded sound every day, using Spotify or apple music to play our favorite songs. However, the radio as a method of transmission allows for broadcast without possession, in the installation, participants can’t start, stop, collect, or discard sonic objects at will. Instead, the agency of the listener is expressed by physical proximity to one of the radio transmitters. As you move through the space, sounds fade in and out through the static as you get closer and further away from the various radio transmitters. You can’t control the content of the transmissions, but you can control how you engage with them via your physical location. Bodies become crossfaders as movement through space brings some sounds into focus while relegating others to the background, recontextualizing the significance of those sounds as they overlap and distort each other.
Very small changes in physical location, sometimes as little as a few inches (or centimeters), can have drastic effects on the sonic experience. The physical control required to fully navigate and explore the borders between transmissions makes the work a proprioceptive listening instrument, a system that ties a thread between the listening of our ears and the physical sensation of the movement of our bodies, a heightened awareness of the relationship between aural listening and bodily sensation. The work proposes a feedback loop in which movement produces meaning, and that meaning motivates movement. Participants hear a sound, make an aesthetic judgement about that sound, then decide to either stay still or move in search of a new sound. This model relies on a sensitive attention to one’s surroundings, and simultaneously encourages listening that informs movement, and movement that informs listening. In a world designed for eyes, the work asks you to trust your ears.
The work begins with static, which remains a significant sonic element throughout the piece. It is not an unwanted artifact, but an indexical sign of disruption. Grayspace is built on jammed radio signals, transmissions on the same frequency that crash into each other, creating fuzzy boundaries, physical spaces where signals interact in unexpected ways. In addition to the jammed radio signals disrupting each other, factors beyond the participants control may intervene to shape the listening experience. Clouds parting or converging, a competing signal from the next town over entering the mix, or an ongoing X-class solar flare may alter the behavior of the radio waves, even if the participant is staying perfectly still. This noisy disruption is paralleled by a soft disruption: by inviting an experience based on sound and movement into a library, a space known for silence and stillness, I hope to push the boundaries of how these vital public spaces can function in our lives.
The library plays a key role in the installation. As you move about the space, allowing your ears to guide you through the stacks, you may find your eyes wandering as your ears take the wheel. You may find surprising relationships between the books on the shelves and the sounds you are hearing. I encourage you to revel in these coincidences and allow them to inform your movement through the space.
A central part of my artistic practice deals with aesthetic experiences as a sort of exercise for unfamiliar ways of moving, listening, and being. I hope that this piece provides you with an environment in which you can listen closely and move with intention, and that you carry some memory of this experience as you go on with the rest of your evenings. Thank you so much for listening, and please enjoy Grayspace.