Adriana Sá Agora – a sound composition. Available through Culturgest's Facebook, Youtube and Instagram.

When the State of Emergency declared in Portugal obliged the population to new social rules, Adriana Sá, like many of us, viewed and listened to her city in a very unusual way. Her perception of the surroundings changed while shifting through fuzzy thresholds existing between the internal and the external, the private and the public.

During those strolls allowed by the mandatory confinement she recorded short and well-disciplined sound diaries, where she aimlessly documented her route from home to the riverside limit. She sought nothing but to capture a new atmosphere charged with new silences, and especially new noises, tensions and sounds, as if some renovated stimuli catalogue altered the multi-sensory landscape. Then she joined those recordings into a single file, respecting their sequential order so as to explore the dramaturgy of her daily walks.    

Culturgest’s invitation led Adriana Sá to face this urban diary as a soothing score of shapes and colours. She combined it with the zither and software that processes pre-recorded sounds based on the sound of the zither. Lisbon's protagonism is not new to her compositions, but “Agora” seems to command our attention more sharply than ever, suggesting multiple directions, and giving us clues to connect with the city.

The journey of Adriana Sá was individual and unique, as well her perception of that unrepeatable time. But the music she fixed and created can also be seen as a musical context for the recent collective memory of those days when we all decelerated the city we live in. As a result, we might listen more and better to that which surrounds us: some of the answers we seek might be hovering in the sonic spectrum around us.