Marseille Tidal Gauge Aria is a vocal performance composed from tide level data collected over the past 130 years from a tidal gauge in the bay of Marseille, France. The artist converted each yearly average tide level into a note within her vocal range and set the resulting atonal composition to a poem from Rasu-Yong Tugen’s Songs from the Black Moon. Sarah Nance performs the piece operatically, drawing on the genre’s propensity for magnified human emotion; the rising sea levels in the bay can be heard in the increasingly higher pitches of the aria.
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