The title of my sound piece is Wax Heart, it gains its name from noticing a ‘beating’ from the loop once one side of a vinyl has finished. During this project I have been spending a lot of time with physical forms of music and have found my connection to the sounds and music I surround myself with to have deepened greatly and I wanted to capture the ‘soul’ that vinyl in particular seems to possess. As I made my way through my collection, I noticed each side had its own distinct sound and crackle that looped once the music had stopped playing. This I find to be akin to the heart of the record.
Inspired in part by Paul Nataraj’s ‘dub in a cup of tea’, the idea of ‘palimpsest’, which he introduced to me during his guest lecture, and the idea of listening beyond the obvious, what composer Pierre Schaeffer called reduced listening, has deeply influenced my approach. I’ve tried to hear not just the melody or message of a track, but the textures that surround it: the residual, the ambient, the overlooked. In this sense, Wax Heart became less about music in the traditional sense, and more about presence—about what remains after the music has stopped. I have been thinking about collection as a form of creation and how we can give sounds new meaning once removed from their original contexts.
Ultimately, this work is about listening in ways that resist speed, perfection, and disposability. It’s about allowing the materiality of sound to guide meaning, rather than imposing it. By returning to physical formats and embracing their limitations, I’ve found not only a deeper connection to the music itself, but to time, memory, and care.