Overview_

Contemporary digital culture tends to frame sound as data rather than as embodied experience: equal temperament is entrenched as a technological default, and immersive media commonly privilege visual navigation over sonic resonance. This exposition documents a practice-research project that works against those tendencies by returning to an instrument and a tuning logic from outside them. Taking as its historical point of departure Thomas Salmon’s 1705 demonstration of justly tuned viol fingerboards before the Royal Society – and the wider early modern conception in which proportion bound together tuning, cosmology, iconography, instrument design, and the disposition of the player’s body – the project developed Earth of Shine and Dark Mottling, a thirty-minute work for three scordatura bass viols tuned to the overtone series of a theoretical fundamental of 2.166 Hz. The work was recorded in a close-miked multitrack studio process, mixed in stereo, binaural, and ambisonic formats, and filmed for both a composite 2D film and an interactive 360° film. The research finds that resonance operates as a relation between tuning system and instrumental spectrum rather than as a property a composition can bestow, positioning the viol as an actor in Latour’s sense; that the studio produces neither a faithful record of embodiment nor a synthetic substitute, but a third thing built from the residue of the body; and that audio and visual components remained more mutually constraining than mutually generative. Historically grounded instruments and unequal temperaments, the project suggests, offer a recalibration of digital practice from within – outlining a novel practice in which history is itself resonant and embodied in the instrument.