Wordless is a suite of 12 sound portraits based on interviews with and by residents of Brussels from the BNA-BBOT archives. Words from the interviews are edited to leave only the hesitations, breathing emotional reactions and environmental sounds. An aspect of the personality of the interviewee somehow comes across in these inbetween sounds, as if when stripped of language another layer of communication comes into focus, more emotional, more revealing than what is expressed in words. The soundtrack of the edited interviews is then re-sampled and set in musical structures with wave-based electronic sounds, resonances, pulses and noise. The pieces themselves take the form of wordless narratives creating a portrait in sounds of an aspect of the personality of the interviewee.

The piece was conceived for a 4 channel system where two channels were played back through headphones and the other two through a PA, creating a sense of inside and outside sound worlds, the voices always coming through binaurally on the headphones while the electronic sounds create a sense of spatiality and physicality and awareness of the listening space.

Texts describing the interviewees and their stories are projected on a video screen so that an idea of the person described in the sound portraits can color how we listen.