On Wanting
A sound–image work re-authored across domestic, concert, and navigable 3D digital environments.
On Wanting is a three-part sound–image lineage developed between 2022 and 2024. The work began from Hamilton’s experience of early motherhood and from the sounds, rhythms, interruptions, and atmospheres of domestic life during that period. Rather than treating motherhood as a fixed subject, the project uses the domestic as a compositional starting point: how can sound and image remain present when attention is partial, interrupted, or redirected?
Developed between 2022 and 2024, On Wanting formed the central case-study lineage within Hamilton’s practice-based PhD research, Composing with Site: Re-authoring Sound-Image Across Physical and Digital Environments. The research examined how sound–image relations are re-authored as a work moves across domestic, concert, and navigable 3D digital environments.
The first version was made to be encountered on a personal device within the listener’s own home. It was later re-authored for the SARC Lab at Queen’s University Belfast, where three screens and ambisonic sound shifted the work into a shared concert setting. A further iteration developed the material as a navigable 3D digital environment, where sound, image, movement, and orientation are encountered through the actions of the individual.
Across these versions, On Wanting does not present the same content in different formats. Each iteration asks what has to change when the site of encounter changes. The work carries forward a recurring palette of sound, colour, duration, and cueing, but each site alters how those materials need to be structured.
Project Description
On Wanting uses slow colour change, domestic sound, and minimal visual movement to create a sustained sound–image environment. A white-to-yellow visual transition unfolds gradually over time, allowing colour to operate as atmosphere rather than illustration.
The sound material is drawn from Hamilton’s everyday sonic environment. At the centre of the first version is a recording of the nursery rhyme A Farmer Wants a Wife, taken from one of her child’s toys. The rhyme is slowed, stretched, and layered until its familiar structure begins to dissolve into drone, texture, and atmosphere.
Other sounds come from ordinary domestic moments: rain, birds, Rice Krispies, pencil on paper. These recordings are not used as documentary evidence. They are treated as compositional material: fragments of lived experience that hold together moments of repetition, care, fatigue, attention, and small sensory intensity.
The work also developed through drawing as a listening process. Hamilton recorded the sound of pencil on paper while responding to the drones, allowing the pressure, speed, and duration of each mark to be shaped by listening.
Iterations / Sites
Iteration I: Domestic
The first version was designed for personal-device playback within the listener’s own domestic environment. It was composed to tolerate interruption, variable sound levels, household activity, and partial attention.
Iteration II: Concert
The concert version re-authored the work for the SARC Lab at Queen’s University Belfast. The duration was condensed, the visual field expanded across three screens, and the sound was spatialised through the Lab’s ambisonic loudspeaker system. In this version, the work became a shared, time-bound event shaped by blackout, fixed seating, calibrated sound, and collective attention.
Iteration III: Navigable 3D Digital Environment
The third iteration translated the work into a navigable 3D digital environment. Here, the viewer becomes an individual moving through the work. Because there is no fixed sequence or shared duration, sound–image relations are structured through spatial cues, thresholds, objects, and areas that can be encountered, left, and re-found through movement.
Site /Re-authoring
On Wanting is structured through re-authoring. Each version responds to the conditions of its site rather than reproducing one fixed work across different formats.
In the domestic version, the work is intimate, interruptible, and held within the listener’s own environment. In the concert version, it becomes spatial, public, and collectively experienced. In the navigable digital version, it becomes something learned through movement, orientation, and return.
The project examines how sound, image, and site shape one another in encounter. Its central concern is not how content can be transferred between formats, but what has to be re-made when the conditions of listening, viewing, and movement change.