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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the intersection of history, listening, and flows of people and water through Times Square by analyzing composer Pamela Z’s site-specific work of sound art, TimesxTimesxTimes with notions of “liquidity,” where water possesses the power to transform, deform, and destabilize.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the intersection of history, listening, and flows of people and water through Times Square through engaging with composer Pamela Z’s collaboration with Geoff Sobelle and PROTOTYPE: OPERA; a work they titled Times3 (TIMES X TIMES X TIMES) (2021). Times3 is a spatially situated work of sound art, a “site specific sonic journey,” that is part soundscape composition, part sonic ethnography, and part soundwalk a la Hildegard Westerkamp. The piece imagines a Times Square that exists simultaneously in the present, past, and future while centering the pre-colonial body of water that moved through the space. Even though it is not visible (or audible), the stream systems that pass(ed) through Times Square are still evident buried deep beneath the asphalt that now covers the city.

Through a series of sonic ethnographies, I am similarly centering Gaston Bachelard’s notion of “liquidity,” where water possesses the primordial power to transform, deform, and destabilize structures, and it conjures the constant change and deconstruction. This liquidity though is not limited to the now-subterranean flows of water, instead, liquidity is experienced further as the flow of intersubjectivity, because “flesh is not just a medium of liquidity, but liquidity itself.”