the First Room
prenatal ambience studies
ongoing research · since 2018
Hearing starts before birth, underwater. In utero, a fetus hears the world outside through fluid and bone, layers of tissues, muffled and slowed, over a constant bed of heartbeat, breath and blood flow. It is a place filled with sound.
Since 2018 I’ve been researching that period as a listening condition and composing functional abstract music from it (a nod to functional dance music) to help listener’s emotional & psychological processing.
One reference point is the French otolaryngologist Alfred Tomatis, who filtered mothers’ voices to approximate how they sound from inside the womb and used the recordings in listening therapy.
An early soundpiece came out of this technique in 2021.
The research is now moving toward an interactive installation in a womb-like space, built around open questions:
Does any of it soothe, or does control itself break the feeling of being held?