wish

This work is a three-part audio composition built from everyday recordings collected over several years alongside an original sound composition. The work opens with a conversation recorded by the sea, where a simple question is asked: “What is your wish?” As the composition unfolds, the listener moves through a shifting sonic landscape of handwriting, distant fox calls, public transport, environmental sound, and everyday conversations in which people speak about the futures they imagine, often while talking about something else. Speech occupies only a small part of the sonic field, unfolding alongside silence, surrounding sound, and composed textures. The work grows from a simple observation. A question invites an answer, while ordinary conversations allow wishes, concerns, and imagined futures to surface without being framed as answers. Wishes emerge unintentionally through ordinary conversation. Recorded sound preserves these qualities of speech in ways that transcription cannot. It retains timing, breath, distance, inflection, and the subtle tensions between voices and their surroundings. As words gradually fragment and overlap within the composition, semantic meaning recedes while these sonic relationships become more perceptible. Listening is no longer only about language as information, but instead attends to the ways voices inhabit space, time, and everyday life. The work ends with a quiet conversation in which the phrase “Make a wish” is spoken again. This question functions as a mode of listening that runs throughout the work. In wish, listeners are invited to remain with the uncertainty of wishing, and to attend to how wishes, concerns, and imagined futures emerge through the sounds of everyday life.