‘The Breath Becomes The Wind’, is a work in development which investigates the relationship between breath at the intimate scale of the body, and the ephemeral forces of the wind which have the power to transform landscapes over vast timespans.

The initial 30 minute exploration of the work explored the anatomy of my clarinets/winds/voice in relation to close and unusual mic placements to hear the instrument from different perspectives.

It was presented by Liquid Architecture at The Meat Market (Naarm/Melbourne) in December 2024 and was winner of the 2025 AMC APRA AMCOS award for Excellence in Experimental Practice.

Sound Engineer and collaborator: Pat Telfer
Presented by Liquid Architecture at The Meat Market Dec 2024
Developed at Coburg Courthouse residency (Arts Merri-bek)

Liquid Architecture artist statement:
The Breath Becomes The Wind pushes my solo electro-acoustic practice into new territory, deeply interrogating the relationship between the body, the instrument, and the microphone, to reveal new instrumental and compositional possibilities. The first iteration was created for the cavernous space the Meat Market, but the work is also highly intimate, bringing the listener into a close proximity to my breath, wind and the anatomy of the clarinet.

The invitation to be a featured artist for Liquid Architecture’s program, was an ideal opportunity to showcase what is unique about my practice. It took some time to identify what this was, and I decided to focus on the relationship between microphones and my instruments (which I often disassemble, or extend with additional tubing). This is an area I have played with in improvised projects (for example waving pipes across a microphone to create pulsing and panning effects), but I felt I had not yet explored the full potential of this approach. I explored various microphone setups in a process that exposed the way the microphones and speakers colour the sound. I played with giving audiences different perspectives on the placement of microphones, as though their ears were right up close to isolated parts of the instruments, and then talking their ears outside of the performance space, into the environment surrounding the venue. Originally limiting the work to no FX, I decided to permit the use of live recording and playback as a haunting of the space, lingering on beyond the performance of the original sound.

I worked closely with sound engineer Pat Telfer, which allowed me to push into possibilities of gain, feedback and resonance that would otherwise be impossible, which also freed up my physicality on stage to be able to work with swinging, hanging and moving mics.

Presented by Chamber Made, at Now or Never Festival and Melbourne Recital Centre as part of ‘Listening Acts’ | Friday 22 August – Saturday 23 August 2025

Green Room awards finalist “Outstanding Sound Work” & “Outstanding Technical Achievement”

Tactile Piece for Human Ears by Aviva Endean creates an intimate listening experience, capturing sounds through binaural microphones which are designed to replicate the acoustic properties of human hearing. Working with sounds which are on the edge of human perception- wind currents, pipe tone and vibrations heard through bone conduction, Aviva builds acoustic landscapes shaped in real time to feel like they’re happening just for you – immersive, strange and quietly communal.

Tactile Piece for Human Ears is a strangely intimate listening work, using multiple instruments and technologies designed specifically for the shape and acoustic properties of human hearing. 

A binaural dummy head “listens” to sounds created through bespoke ‘Hear Muffs’- which filter, extend and transform the acoustic properties of our hearing, before the resulting sounds are funnelled out to each audience member’s ears via bluetooth headphones. 

But are we all experiencing the same thing? How do the anatomical differences in our own makeup, and our unique set of desires, memories and associations filter our experience of the sound?  

Throughout the performance, I weave together small and intimate sounds, almost tangible in their immediacy. The gestures become layered and disassociated from their original performance, playing with our sense of proximity and spatial awareness, as well as toying with our sense of reality, our intimacy with technology, and the perceived “truthfulness” of binaural recording technology.

This new piece emerges out of several pre-existing works. Since 2013, I have been performing ‘Intimate Sound Immersions’, a form of solo performance for one blindfolded audience member at a time. I use the fragile sounds of everyday objects alongside the extremely quiet possibilities of the bass clarinet played in extreme close proximity to the listeners ears. The Intimate Sound Immersion occupies a space between experimental performance and sound therapy, the intensity of the one-on one experience transporting listeners into the depths of their own imaginations, and often eliciting an experience described as at once challenging, soothing and intensely intimate. Tactile Piece for Human Ears builds on this form and queries the potential for intimacy when mediated through technology.

The ‘Hear Muff’ instruments used in this work have come out of many years of play and experimentation, including the development of ‘Sonic Labyrinth’ created with Justin Marshall and children at Art Play (which is reimagined as an installation work for Now or Never). In Sonic Labyrinth, children used various sets of Hear Muffs to listen to the push of pull on underwater gurgling, to hear the sounds beneath their feet as they walk blindfolded and barefoot along a pathway of various surface textures, and to lie down and be played a a bone-conduction lullaby. The Hear Muffs designs were later developed with designer Tahl Swieca for participatory installations at M Pavilion Parkville, and Music Meeting (The Netherlands), with new iterations of the Hear Muffs developed especially for Tactile Piece for Human Ears. 

REVIEWS/FURTHER READING

Listening with Discomfort and Possibility by Josephine Mead in Art Guide

‘Chamber Made craft moments where sound pulses inside us, not just into us.’

‘… an exquisite meditation on sound and perception.’ [Tactile Piece for Human Ears]

‘… a fluid, thought-provoking journey through acoustic textures that pushes the boundaries between audience and performance.’ ‘Chamber Made craft moments where sound pulses inside us, not just into us.’

‘… an exquisite meditation on sound and perception.’ [Tactile Piece for Human Ears]

‘… a captivating choreography of space, objects, and bodies.’ [sounding forms / forming sounds]

‘… a fluid, thought-provoking journey through acoustic textures that pushes the boundaries between audience and performance.’

MY MELBOURNE ARTS

CREDITS

Hear Muff concept and design: Aviva Endean 

Hear Muff design and fabrication: Tahl Swieca

Sound engineer: Patrick Telfer

“An imaginative and beautiful sonic vision of a truly original composer-musician.”- Salt Peanuts

“Aviva Endean has proven time and time again that she is an expert of the aural adventure.“
–Loud and Quiet

Australian composer and clarinetist Aviva Endean has developed an impressive capacity for creating work that merges intense control (of breath, of instrument, of composition) and a willingness to allow the music to lead. On Moths And Stars, her second solo work, she charts out a sound world that is equal parts timbre and tone, placing sounds relationship to space as a paramount focus for her pieces.- Lawrence English (Room40):

“Rich worlds revealed in slow motion”– Brad Rose (Foxy Digitalis)

“Breathtaking innovation in woodwind technique and sonic vision” – Martin Ng”

“(Aviva’s) expressive spatial variation becomes both polyphonic as well as multiphonic with the use of electronics” (The Wire)

From Aviva Endean: Coming from a background as a performer and clarinet player, the opportunity to record my own music opened up a whole new context to think about music. Sounds are freed from being con-fined to one place, one time, or even one perspective. I wanted the recording to have a right-up-in-your-ear kind of intimacy – so close, that you could hear the beating of a moth’s wing, but I also wanted the listener to experience the expansiveness of the recorded space, like the vast night sky. The microphones became extensions of my instruments, getting right up close to capture the microscopic, creating tones of feedback which captivated me, or zooming out to capture multiple acoustic spaces. My recording and composing process became more intuitive and explorative, another form of play. I could start creating and see where the piece would take me, and notice how new relationships were formed as I folded multiple time/spaces in and over each other. Sometimes I would begin by gleaning sounds from my archives, and listening to how they could be reimagined and transformed alongside the discoveries my microphones and instruments were finding. In ‘Nightwork’ I wanted to find a way to revisit some microtonal humming that I had recorded for a sound design project, and then discovered the Leslie speaker as a way to spin my bass clarinet sound around the microphones, creating bass tones emerging as waves out of the densely layered pitches. Sometimes a new instrumental fascination, such as the e-bows and magnets on ‘Mirror Signals’ or the binaural microphone feedback on ‘Moths & Stars’ would call for me to find further layers of clarinets and field recordings to be woven into their story.

Read this if you would like to hear about the process and inspiration behind each track in more detail.

Recorded and composed by Aviva Endean, on unceded Gadigal, Wurundjeri and Djaara Lands.
Field recording on What Calls in the Quiet made with Justin Marshall. Strands of Same River, Twice recorded by Bob Scott, and Leo Dale.
Mastered by Lawrence English at Negative SpaceThank you to Room40, my friends, family, and community.
This project was supported by The Australia Council for the Arts and the Peggy Glanville-HicksComposers’ House.

“An ensemble of five remarkable women delivers an electrifying fusion of mythology, sensuality and sonic daring” (5 star Limelight review *****)

The Cloud Maker is a collaboration that began on the snowy peaks of Canada, where Te Kahureremoa Taumata, Sunny Kim and Aviva Endean met on a residency at The Banff Centre in 2019. In a cosy wooden hut, they connected over a story of the Maori moth goddess Raukatauri, the creation story of the Putorino, a cocoon shaped flute, and just one of the many tāonga pūoro(singing treasures) which Taumata plays. 

On another mountain, at the Ukaria centre in the Adelaide Hills, The Cloud Maker delved deeper into their connection, with an expanded line up interweaving Te Kahureremoa’s knowledge of the Maori Tāonga Pūoro (including nose flutes, bone flutes and poi) Aviva’s experimental approach to clarinets and winds and Sunny’s evocative vocals, alongside master instrumentalists Freya Schack-Arnott (cello/nyckelharpa) and Maria Moles (drums). 

Reimagining folkloric stories of goddesses from their many shared heritages, The Cloud Maker’s powerful music echoes tales of creation, regeneration and transformation, and evokes a time when music and language, art and life, were intertwined. 

2026
MAR 21 MONASH BIG JAZZ DAY OUT

Spring Tour 2025
OCT 30 MELBOURNE RECITAL CENTRE
OCT 31 TANK ARTS CAIRNS
NOV 01 SYDNEY INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S JAZZ FESTIVAL

Album launch tour 2025
FEB 15 EASTMINT(NAARM/MELBOURNE)
FEB 18 PHOENIX CENTRAL PARK (GADIGAL/SYDNEY)
FEB 20 PLATFORM ARTS (DJILANG/GEELONG)
FEB 21 THE PHEE BROADWAY (DJARRA/CASTLEMAINE)
FEB 23 M PAVILION (NAARM/MELBOURNE)
MAR 8-10 WOMAD (TARNTANYA/ADELAIDE)

2022
Debut performances presented by NEXUS ARTS and Australian Art Orchestra.
UKARIA residency

Released on SOFA (Norway) 2018

cinder : ember : ashes is Aviva’s first solo release and marks a move towards a more introspective sound. A collection of both composed and improvised recordings, the album offers a selection of liminal, ethereal and elusive resonances. Distinct and refined instrumentations set up a framework of unique sonic environments, which then become a landscape for Aviva’s slowly morphing and contemplative improvisations.

Several tracks explore a veiling of the clarinet, placing another sonic force alongside the instrument which then works together with the clarinet in a symbiotic relationship. In ‘apparition : above’ Aviva uses the skin of the timpani as a resonant chamber which alters, distorts and beats against the tone of the clarinet and amplifies its resonant frequencies into a swirling and glissing halo of sound. ‘vapour : between’ transfigures the tone of the clarinet through a miniature pocket-sized amplifier, the sound of the clarinet distorted and fragmented in a playful and rhythmic trance-like meditation. The umtshingo (harmonic flute) reveals itself in ‘undulations : behind’ through a multitude of subtle effects and feedback, through which the listener may eventually distinguish the beautiful simplicity of this instrument. 

In part, this album took inspiration from the musicologist Andrew Killicks’ concept of ‘holicipation’—a term he coined to describe solo musical practices that are not rehearsals, not practicing for something, but are playing for oneself. The playing is ‘holistic’ in the sense that it constitutes audience, composer and performer, and has no investment in a musical future, but instead finds nourishment in the present. Aviva’s introduction to this term from the musicologist Cara Stacey (who also introduced Aviva to the umtshingo, featured on the album) inspired a refocusing of Aviva’s practice in a more introspective, meditative approach to solo playing, in parallel to her heavily collaborative artistic practices. As it happened, some of these solo explorations eventually developed into pieces that she chose to share with the world, but the process of ‘holicipation’ none the less constituted a vital part of this music’s formation.

Complete Review of cinder : ember : ashes by Joe O’Conner for Loudmouth

There has been palpable buzz around Aviva’s Endean’s work of the last few years, a sense that she is onto something interesting that is getting stronger and stronger. She is one of a number of classically trained Australian artists who have developed improvised and experimental practices in parallel with their work in notated disciplines. Cinder : ember : ashes is Aviva’s first solo recording. Released on the SOFA label, it is an introspective collection of pieces played on clarinet, bass clarinet, umtshingo flute and voice.  Each of seven pieces creates a musical microcosm where particular sonic parameters, instrumental techniques and effects are subjected to subtle and inventive permutations. Aviva coerces sophisticated timbrel palletes from her instruments, using minimal pitch materials to draw attention to resonance, inflection and the folk-like directness of her approach.

Breath and cyclical movement form the locus for improvisation in Burst in black : under. It is the opening track of cinder : ember : ashes and displays Aviva’s mastery of overtones on the bass clarinet in winding repetitions of a motif. She oscillates between low register fundamentals and multiphonic overtones that split apart as the dynamic increases. Occasionally, higher overtones emerge above the texture, parsing it into three registers with distinct timbrel identities. The cleaving of pitches into their component overtones is further inflected by an alternation up and down by an interval of a tone with an almost dance like regularity. It is a hypnotic prelude.

A number of the pieces explore the interface of acoustic instrument with an external sound device, and situate the musical exploration within the particular sonic possibilities of the interaction. Particularly effective is apparition : above, in which the sound of the clarinet activates sympathetic resonances on the skin of a timpani drum. Aviva used the timpani’s tuning pedal to manipulate this resonance, creating delicate glissandos that move independently of the clarinet’s pitch material – a counterpoint of inflection. The timpani also becomes a resonating chamber for the clarinet, creating an almost cathedral-like spatiality in which the presence of the lower and middle registers of the clarinet are amplified but also sound somehow distant. Aviva’s use of the timpani elegantly channels the resonance of the clarinet into fragile, fluctuating harmonic formations.

Vapor : between explores the interaction of clarinet and device for the opposite effect. The clarinet is projected through a pocket-sized amplifier that distorts and compresses the sounds, stripping it of the fullness of its acoustic tone. The sound is lo-fi and electronic, the lovechild of a poor quality synthesiser and virtuoso kazoo. Aviva transforms the limitations of the tiny amplifier into creative potential, using variations in pitch, volume and timbre to push it to the point of distortion.

A song-like quality emerges in the motivic consistency of a number of improvisations, but is nowhere more present than in distant song : afar. This piece combines Aviva’s voice and what I assuming to be the umtshingo, a Zulu flute capable of producing harmonics when overblown. It commences with a pentatonic melody, sung with a combination of oo, ah and eh sounds. In the opening, the oo sounds activate the flute, creating a pulsating pitch centre around which the melody rises and falls. This transitions into a harmonic texture in which the flute sounds strikingly like a medieval portative organ, though with a rugged clashing of overtones. Though I hesitate to ascribe particular influences from other cultures, there appears to be direct references to African folk traditions. There is a simplicity and modesty to this shorter piece that makes it an effective interlude between Aviva’s more esoteric explorations.

To achieve a well rounded and varied collection of short solo pieces is no easy feat for a solo wind player. Aviva has tackled the challenge with considerable imagination, revealing an impressive ability to transform iterative pitch materials into sensitive, sonically intricate formations. I consider solo albums to be an artist’s expression of confidence in their own vision. There is no hiding and no potential to feed on the creativity of others – the stakes are high! If Cinder : ember : ashes is a statement about Aviva’s confidence in her solo concept, then her confidence is well founded.