Irish composer and performer Jennifer Walshe has engaged intensively with Mars and outer space. Her research took her from the Great Equatorial Telescope in Greenwich to sound recordings from Mars. She now combines her “space archive” with new material. The result is a composition for Walshe’s voice, three musicians, live electronics, and video.

The piece thinks of the concert hall on the scale of the universe: the live electronics track makes solar wind, cosmic background radiation, and chemical reactions audible, recorded on stage with hydrophones. The video projection traverses vast spaces, from live microscope images to distant stars.

The title plays on what astronomy calls “the great silence” — the fact that telescopes and space probes have so far found no evidence of life beyond Earth. THE GREATER NOISE revels in the sheer quantity of energy and information surrounding the Earth, which Walshe is able to access through scientific instruments.

Double bass: Manu Mayr
Saxophone: Jakob Gnigler
Analogue synthesiser, sound processing, and piano: Thomas Lehn
Voice, electronics: Jennifer Walshe