Whisper

Petralia, Peter Salvatore (2008) Whisper. [Video]

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Abstract

Whisper is a visually decadent, aurally immersive performance that asks the audience to question ‘what is real’ in a world of increasing technological sophistication. Each audience member is given a set of headphones through which they hear the voices of three live performers narrating a fictional walk through a fictional city. Obscured behind a cinematic screen, the performers are seen as shadows, silhouettes or in stark clarity, creating a fully immersive sound environment to accompany their narration. Not only are the three performers narrating a walk that switches between the ‘here and now’ of the story and ‘dream-world’ of memory, but they are also creating a fully immersive sound environment through the use of a sound technique called foley. Foley is a technique employed in film, where a sound artist adds sounds to a film after the film has been shot, thereby creating a hyper-realistic world of sound for the film.