About See Hear Now performance

David and Gisela Gamper’s See Hear Now was a real-time music and video collaboration that sought to merge the sonic and the visible, and to transport the performers and audience into a transcendent experience.

The live music improvisations were created by David, using sounds made by his piano, small instruments and found objects. During the performance, David expanded the acoustic sound through electronic transformations and spatial diffusion while retaining the power of the natural sound. David moved freely among the worlds of music performance, improvisation and electronic instrument design. These passions merged in the performer controlled sound processing environments he created for himself and other acoustic improvising musicians. David performed and recorded as a member of Deep Listening Band (with Pauline Oliveros and Stuart Dempster) from 1990 to 2011 and appears on many recordings with DLB and others.

Gisela brought her photographic aesthetic and fascination with light, patterns and rhythm to her video work, which she filmed both in nature and the city. She was able to perform her video using a system that combined analog and digital technology. During the performance, the footage was then projected onto an array of mirrors, creating a visual and sonic immersive environment for the viewer. 

See Hear Now premiered in upstate New York in 1999. The duo has since been featured in Brooklyn College’s Electroacoustic Music Festival in 2003, the 2004 SOUNDPlay festival in Toronto and in Juilliard’s 2005 Beyond the Machine festival in New York City. Other installations, performances and residencies include the Jack Straw Music Gallery in Seattle, the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In New York City they performed at ISSUE: Project Room’s Sensorium Festival and Floating Points Festival in 2009 and in Roulette’s Festival of Mixology in 2006 and 2008. They released their DVD See Hear Now: Visible Music in 2005. 

In 2014 the duo was awarded The Golden Ear Award by The Deep Listening Institute (now Center for Deep Listening at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY) for their many years of participating in and contributing to the mission of the Institute.