It has been confirmed that Platform 4’s live event has been changed into a new digital piece of work, blending film and soundscape to create an immersive and intimate meditation on hearing loss.
Premiering online on the 15th July at 8pm, this digital experience from Platform 4 is aimed at raising awareness for the 12 million individuals in the UK with hearing difficulties by exploring the sensation of having the frequency of your life’s soundtrack altered.
Formed of a collection of moving stories, Invisible Music features a loose narrative guided through enchanting musical moments and verbatim audio, drawn from the personal experiences of Platform 4’s Artistic Director, Catherine Church, her mother and others at her local lip-reading group. The piece also includes projections by digital artist Barret Hodgson (Fatboy Slim; Motionhouse; Tom Dale Company) and the acoustic delights of Musical Director Pete Flood (Bellowhead; Marc Almond;
Lol Coxhill) and Sound Designer Jules Bushell (Walk the Plank; Kneehigh; BBC), to help highlight the range of emotions that come with hearing loss.
The company has mixed a variety of musical instruments and sampled voices to examine a unique and unexplored perspective.
Talking about the news Catherine Church said: “This is my most personal piece to date, inspired by my mother and her own experiences of gradually losing her hearing. Attending her lip-reading classes was quite a
revelation, I hadn’t realised how much she was lip reading. I was also struck by how many of these seemingly ‘proper’ people were having quite a hallucinogenic experience of the world day to day! Living through the last few weeks of coronavirus has made me think about how the
gradual isolation that hearing loss brings is similar to the gradual losses we have all noticed in our lives in quarantine.”
To ensure that accessibility is kept at the forefront, this new digital experience will be captioned enabling the message at the heart of the piece to be shared by a broader audience. The project has been supported by emergency funding from Arts Council England.
In turn, numerous arts venues across the UK are also supporting Invisible Music by sharing the video on their channels. These venues include: Theatre Royal Winchester; Jacksons Lane; Southbank Centre; Lighthouse Poole; Colchester Arts Centre; Pound Arts Centre; Turner Sims Southampton; The Hot Tin, Faversham; West End Centre; The Stables, Milton Keynes; The Point Theatre; The Spring Arts & Heritage Centre; City Eye, Southampton; Cambridge Junction; EM Forster Theatre, Tonbridge; Lakeside Arts, University of Nottingham; Gulbenkian Theatre, Canterbury; Exeter Phoenix; The North Wall; Marine Theatre; Quay Arts; and Norwich Arts Centre.
Invisible Music will premiere online on the 15th July at 8pm. To find out more about Platform 4 visit: http://www.platform4.org/