Melissa Dubbin and Aaron S. Davidson

Vocal Braid, 2025

Water, borosilicate glass, porcelain, air pumps, water pumps, control system, custom electronics, sound, video, metal hardware, power supplies.
Dimensions variable, approximately 2.5 x 2.5 x 4 meters
Courtesy of the artists.

Custom borosilicate glass spiral coils and custom glass forms fabricated for the artists by Dylan Karle, NYC.

The voice is reality's programming language. We inherit our vocal traits, a timbre containing entire ecosystems of meaning. The child who unconsciously adopts a parent's inflection carries forward genetic and cultural codes, passed through the intimacy of vocal exchange. The cover song operates similarly, a form of vocal genetics where influence transmits across time.

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The performance of a cover song is a conscious act of echoing another's voice, letting it shape our throat, our breath, and our neural pathways as it becomes part of us, a form of vocal inheritance. Our voices carry our intentions and our ancestry. As psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster observes, before we breathe air, we breathe liquid; before we speak, we are spoken to through water. This first voiceless listening shapes our capacity for breath itself—the rhythm of our future breathing already encoded in the pulse of amniotic tides. In this borrowing we enact what happens unconsciously before birth, braiding our parents' voices into our developing vocal cords, as well as our non-human ancestors whose vocal sacs first pushed air through water to create sound.

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The Pacific chorus frog performs the ultimate cover song—its voice standing in for every frog species on Earth in cinema's sonic imagination, a single croak that has trained generations to hear amphibian life through one particular vocal frequency. The frog's nocturnal chorus, modulating the atmosphere, demonstrates voice as fundamentally sculptural, air carved into meaning. In modular synthesis, we witness voice decomposed into its constituent elements: oscillators, filters, envelopes. The synthesizer exposes what the throat has always known—that voice is voltage, that breath is biological circuitry. The frog understood this millennia before us: vocal sacs as organic resonators, bodies as living machines for atmospheric manipulation.

Vocal Braid materializes this process as an architecture of sound transmission. Sound is the movement of air. The frog's vocal sac, inflating and deflating beneath the water's surface, provides the evolutionary template for this liquid acoustics. Each bubble becomes what Peter Sloterdijk calls a sphere of intimacy—a self-contained acoustic world where breath creates space, where the voice constructs its own atmospheric envelope. These spheres of air moving through water form a foam of possibilities, each bubble a miniature amnion carrying the potential for voice. Glass forms in the shape of delay lines make visible the passage of air bubbles through water. Here the delays are evolutionary. Voices cascade through time, human harmonies interweaving with the phantom frequencies of our ancestors. These porcelain vessels served as acoustic amplifiers and a site for embryonic development for Pacific chorus frogs in their Northern California habitat. 

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If our voice shapes reality, we must speak, collectively, what we want to construct. We must call and respond, listen and become. Air itself becomes a medium of psychic transmission, each breath an exchange between interior and exterior worlds, between self and other. The voice requires this borrowed air, this shared atmosphere that has passed through countless lungs before reaching ours, carrying traces of every breath before it. Glass embodies this paradox of transparency and barrier. The rigid liquid state of glass captures the liminal nature of voice itself: neither fully terrestrial nor aquatic, carrying the memory of both states. Water appears in this work not as metaphor but as medium. The hydroelectric plant setting of La Centrale offers a space already defined by water's transformative power, and its conversion to energy.

Webster, Jamieson. On Breathing. Catapult, 2024.
Sloterdijk Peter. Bubbles: Spheres I. Translated by Wieland Hoban, Semiotext(e), 2011.
Sloterdijk Peter. Foam: Spheres III. Translated by Wieland Hoban, Semiotext(e), 2016.

Many thanks to Maxime Guitton, Jean-Paul Felley, Dylan Karle, Jess Swan, Alex Hayden and Christophe Constantin.

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Melissa Dubbin and Aaron S. Davidson

Born in 1976 and born in 1971
Based in Brooklyn (New York)

Melissa Dubbin and Aaron S. Davidson have co-authored works across a variety of mediums. Together they apply collaborative processes in their practice and engagement with materials. Their works are characterized by transformations of the biological and mechanical; gemstones record, metals have memory, sounds are given shape and fluids hydrate machines. Their recent projects explore relations between the environment, computing and artificial life forms.