Tina Pearson created three new virtual reality works (A Womb and her Voice Eggs; Dance of the Circuit Boxes; and An Ancient Chorus Under the Sea) featuring processed voices and beating sine tones, for Entanglements in Cyberspace, a live performance in the 3D multi user metaverse Second Life, with the Avatar Orchestra Metaverse at Sounds of the Metaverse Conference, Chopin University, Warsaw, Poland November, 2024.

A Womb and Her Voice Eggs invited members of the Avatar Orchestra, who reside in various locations in Europe and North America, to record themselves realizing a score for recalling ancestral memory and language – whether dreamed, imagined, or known. Pearson scripted small fragments of the language samples into “voice eggs” that sounded the fragments and emitted a subtle white light when triggered. A “nest” was built to contain the voice eggs of each AOM member, who played the eggs while disguised as spores drifting through a giant bare upside down tree. The eggs were eventually spilled out of each nest, to drift and fall far down and out of hearing and sight range. The textures for the voice eggs were created by Johannes Riedmann.

Slide show: Screen grabs from the recording of the live performance at Chopin University, Warsaw.

Dance of the Circuit Boxes takes advantage of the difference in Alternating Currents in the electrical systems between Europe and North America to create a buzzing resonating soundscape with beating and sliding sine tones. The European performers triggered scripted tubes using a set of tones based on the harmonic series of 50 Hertz (their AC), while the North Americans did the same with tones based on the harmonic series of 60 Hertz (their AC). The two “circuit boxes” in the virtual space were separated by a distance where the tones are not heard by one another locally, but are played through separated right and left channel loudspeakers in the real life theatre in Warsaw. The two boxes each have a separate colour spectrum (yellows to reds for the Europeans; blues to purples for the North Americans).