The motet is Thomas Tallis's 16th-century choral work, Spem in alium, which Cardiff has recorded so that each of its 40 parts is relayed to an individual speaker positioned in the cathedral cloister. Those visiting the installation will walk up and down amid a forest of loudspeakers, shifting their perspective on Tallis's motet as they go.Spem in alium made an immediate impact when Cardiff first heard it. "The 40 different voices started me thinking that this would be fantastic if I could make it big and spread out the harmonies and walk among them," she says. "I wanted to hear it three-dimensionally, in a sculptural way. The place itself will be like a conductor."As with Cardiff's other sound installations, each listener's experience will be unique "Some parts will be accentuated The listener will express their taste by walking around. They can choose what aesthetic they like."Cardiff, who was born in Canada (which she represents at the Venice Biennale this year) and lives in Berlin, is probably best known to British art followers for the walk she constructed around London's East End entitled The Missing Voice (Case Study B). Those taking part went along to Whitechapel Library and picked up a CD Walkman which played a commentary and instructions that took listeners around some East End byways before ending up at Liverpool Street station.
Exploiting the tension between the reality around the walker and the version of reality being presented on the soundtrack, Cardiff's voiceover recorded while she made the walk herself describes some objects that weren't actually there, or that were only there sometimes such as a lime-green car belonging to Chris Ofili.The result can be disconcerting. "There's one point where on the soundtrack a car is coming from the left," Cardiff says. "I just cannot force myself to cross that street until the car on the soundtrack is gone although I can see that it's actually not there All my audio walks are about creating virtual environments. You think a car's passing and it's not; you think someone's behind you and they're not there."Cardiff expects that similar phenomena will be created at Salisbury Cathedral "This piece creates a virtual choir The speakers will be anthropomorphic.
They're all going to be placed at the height of the average ear. They will become people."Common to both the East End and Salisbury works, and essential to Cardiff's working method, is Shirley, a polystyrene head liberated from a hair salon that Cardiff rigs up with a microphone placed by each ear, so that the sound recorded is as a human would hear it.Shirley created quite a stir when chaperoned through the East End for The Missing Voice, but she takes a relative back seat in Forty Part Motet, joining members of the Salisbury Cathedral Choir School when Spem in alium was recorded last December. In order to minimise "cross-talk" effects, each of the 40 singers had an individual microphone suspended around their necks like a name tag at a trade convention, while Shirley sat in to capture some ambient sound.Forty Part Motet is the latest chapter in what is for Cardiff a lifelong fascination with sound. "One thing that interests me is the intimacy of sound," she says "We have much more filtration when we look We turn off Sound comes immediately and it's hard to stop it. It enters your consciousness much more easily than the visual.
