In this post, I will write down several thoughts along with what came up during my tutorial. One of the most important things I learned from my exhibition at Gallery46 last year was how the audience perceives a work. Creators often become so deeply immersed in their own work that they fail to see it from a distance. This means that we often do not think about how an ordinary viewer—someone encountering the work with no prior information—will understand it, where their eyes will go first and linger, and whether what we intend to communicate is actually delivered. I found myself thinking about these issues once again in relation to my current project.

First of all, the piece I am working on has a very mechanical appearance. A moving speaker, a rail, blended sounds—this is roughly how I imagine the work. The theme of the piece is conflict, and the sounds emitted from the speaker also relate to conflict, but how will viewers interpret the overall image of the work? This became a point of discussion during the tutorial. The mechanical and minimalistic aesthetic may come across as visually pleasing, machine-like, or even somewhat cute. But does this effect align with what I am actually trying to convey? I cannot answer this with certainty, because I am not the audience. For this reason, once the prototype is reasonably complete, I plan to conduct an experiment.

The first model will be exactly as I initially planned. The second model will be identical except for one change: adding a human mouth to the surface of the speaker. The uncanny valley effect refers to the strange feeling produced when something is almost familiar but not quite. A speaker with a human mouth may create a degree of this uncanny effect. In other words, when communicating a theme like interpersonal conflict, such a mouth might encourage people to focus more closely on the sounds. This is because the mouth visually suggests a “speaker,” prompting the audience to pay more attention to what is being said.

Ultimately, these effects and audience reactions will need to be observed through video documentation or direct testing so that I can gather meaningful feedback.

I also want to reflect on my second idea. Its title is When Does a Note Die? and it explores how a performer’s physical actions influence the perception of a musical work. The draft concept is as follows. In the first piece, the performer sits at the piano, strikes a note forcefully, and continues to hold their posture long after the sound has faded. When I attend classical concerts, I often see conductors keeping their arms raised even after the music ends, creating a silence in which the audience remains still and refrains from clapping. Is this silence part of the piece? In the second piece, the pianist presses a single note (with the pedal held down), immediately bows, and leaves the stage. Will people think the piece has ended or not? A further extension of this idea moves into the digital realm. If an audio track is ten minutes long and a single note appears briefly at the beginning and then disappears, will listeners still perceive the piece as ongoing until the file itself ends? Will their reaction differ from that of a live performance? In another variation, the sustained note may continue, but the digital interface visually indicates that the track has already ended—how will listeners respond then?

During the tutorial, our discussion centered on the question of what silence actually is. My tutor, Ingrid, previously performed in a group called Susurrations, where they developed a method called Aftersound Improvisation. This involves listening to the aftersound of the previous note and responding by playing the next note based on the impression it leaves. That work speaks directly to the idea of aftersound and silence. Since silence plays a significant conceptual role in my own project as well, it seems necessary to study this further. My plan is to examine various classical performance videos (same pieces, same performers, etc.) and analyze how audiences respond to silence.