Trevor Agus at SARC – Culture File

In this penultimate episode of my series of interviews on silence, I speak to Trevor Agus of SARC. Belfast’s Sonic Arts Research Centre is a world class facility for the study of sound. I’d met some SARC staff at the Happy Days Beckett Festival in Eniskillen, including the composer and sound designer David Bird. So it was an enormous privilege to visit in person.

SARC was also recently the subject of an incredible binaural documentary by Clare Cronin, for RTE Lyric.

Trevor Agus’s interest in sound goes back to an adolescence composing computer music. This led to the study of human perception, and his current research – how humans recognise and differentiate sounds. We spoke about the adaptive utility of quiet, the possibility of silence and the pain of tinnitus.

Speaking of silence, Anand Jagatia, one of the attendees at the recent Hearsay Festival in Limerick, has a fantastic piece about silence and tinnitus. Paolo Pietropaolo also produced an incredible piece about his own tinnitus, which Brendan Baker (of Love & Radio) included in his ‘Ears Forward’ listening evening in Brooklyn last year.

Download: Trevor Agus at SARC