In a space between heaven and home, for Violin, Viola and 3D Audio

(binaural rendering of work, please listen with headphones)

A higher audio quality version of this piece can be found here.

A space between heaven and home.

Perhaps it doesn’t exist,
yet its distance is felt, though unseen;

the quiet knowing
that I could never inhabit your reality,

nor you within mine.

Still, we exist together in this in-between;

once, and even now,
it is beautiful.
And if this world were to combust in a burst of light,

and no eyes were left to witness,
Still
we died trying.

***

In a space between heaven and home explores the fragile tension between empathy and inexplicability: our desire to empathise with another person’s reality, and the impossibility of ever fully inhabiting it. Between these conditions exists a liminal space shaped not by certainty, but by the decision to continue reaching toward one another despite inevitable distance and fragmentation. This act of reaching considers how futures are shaped not only by grand gestures, but by quieter acts of persistence: the decision to listen, remain vulnerable, and continue trying to coexist without full understanding.

The piece is constructed from recordings captured across contrasting environments: children playing in public spaces, treadle sewing machines and handiwork, frantic typewriter rhythms, shattered glass, drone hums, and voices shouting. These recordings are stretched, pitch-shifted, spectrally transformed, and resynthesized, dissolving the boundaries between recognition and abstraction. Combined with prepared violin and viola recordings, the work moves through shifting energy states, at times suspended and peaceful, at times tense and unstable. At its core, the work asks whether beauty lies not in achieving mutual understanding, but in continuing to try regardless, even when connection remains incomplete, uncertain, fragile, temporary, impossible.