The sounds you hear in the Fern Room are of the composition Cardinal Points by Miami artists Gustavo Matamoros and Rene Barge. Using small microphones, they have recorded the vibrations of tiny objects, transformed them to emphasize their surprising range of timbre, and arranged them into a “virtual space” among the Fern Room’s four loudspeakers. The sounds are like characters — we hear the way they sound from their own perspective, and they move about the space, communicating with each other and directing the listener’s attention from the center of the room out to the four corners of the space and beyond. Like the plants in the Fern Room, each sound can be examined in isolation, but once they come together in a large group, another level of richness is unveiled.
