Part virtual music box and part sonic sculpture, Matthew D. Gantt's “Earmark” is an immersive audio composition situated among an assemblage that foregrounds the materiality of its own production. At the work's center rests a digitized Neumann binaural head, which is a canonical recording tool for three-dimensional audio that leverages the shape of the physical ear to mark presence in (dis)embodied space. As sonic objects drift across the digital expanse, plastic sounds bend and twist in sculptural gesture, scatter in pointillist bursts, and gather in swirling masses of sound. Animated by procedural MIDI systems, sampled instrument libraries contort against their idiomatic limitations in a recursive dance of virtual-in-real-in-virtual. The work exists in permutations both as a browser-based experience and as binaural and ambisonic sound mixes in the collector's downloadable files.
