Artist Statement
O+ Festival,
Kingston NY 10/2024
The theme of the Festival was presented to artists as an ode to “Noise”. The fundamental block of my artwork is the sound of language. With the polarization of politics, language becomes Noise when there is no Truth. James Kirchick wrote “Today ‘disinformation’ and ‘misinformation” are often invoked by the left in the same way ‘fake news’ is by the right: as derogatory terms for arguments or evidence unhelpful to one’s political tribe.”¹ In a world where political rhetoric is Truth or Lie, Real or AI Generated, the strategy of politicians and media is to create states of “Discredit” and “Reaffirm”.
Noise, in the science of acoustics, has several color adjectives; Brown, Black, White, and Pink. These adjectives describe the acoustic filters that create different perceptions of sound. We create our own filters depending on the news feeds we watch, or through the “filtered” algorithms in our social media.
This sound installation, much like other of my sound works, examines the rhythms of speech as a method to reflect on not only what we say, but how we say it. The intonation of spoken words form a “chording” or the phonetic scale of language. As source material, “A Chording to Lady Mondegreen” plays back audio from speeches by politicians, which marks progress to some and retreats to others. The audio of the speeches are scrambled, played back and unscrambled overtime to reveal the actual speech.
“Lady Mondegreen” refers to hearing words which are not spoken². Much like confabulation, in which someone holds on to a false belief even though it is easily proven false, many of us have grown ears with filters to hear what we want to hear.
The title, “A Chording of Lady Mondegreen”, translates to a political discourse that is no longer a discussion from the Latin, “to investigate” but rather to create an atmosphere of debate (Latin, “to beat down”).
David Held
¹ NY Times, Sept. 23, 2024
² “A mondegreen is a mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase in a way that gives it a new meaning. In a 1954 essay in Harper’s Magazine, Sylvia Wright described how, as a young girl, she misheard the last line of the first stanza from the ballad “The Bonnie Earl o’ Moray” (from Thomas Percy’s 1765 book Reliques of Ancient English Poetry). She wrote:
When I was a child, my mother used to read aloud to me from Percy’s Reliques, and one of my favorite poems began, as I remember:
“Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands, Oh, where have ye been?
They have slain the Earl Amurray, And Lady Mondegreen.”
The correct lines are:
“They have slain the Earl o’ Moray, And laid him on the green.”
Wright explained the need for a new term: The point about what I shall hereafter call mondegreens, since no one else has thought up a word for them.” Wikipedia
makingwithheld.com 