Helen Thorington, Who Brought Sonic Art To The Airwaves, Dies At 94
Helen Torrington, whose stirring vocal compositions helped bring the art of radio to a national audience and created a soundscape for filmmakers, artists and choreographers, died April 13 in Lincoln, Massachusetts. He was 94 years old.
He died in hospice care of complications from Alzheimer's disease, his partner and colleague Jo Ann Green said. His death was not reported at the time.
Radio was a niche medium when Ms. Torrington began, but she helped make the model more recognizable through her work, appearing frequently on NPR and other nonprofit outlets and later as the founder of a company called New Radio America. which ordered more than 300 songs. It was played on over 70 radio stations for over ten years, starting in 1987.
Ms. Torrington began her pioneering work in the 1970s as a writer interested in expanding her stories and scripts into impressionistic radio plays. He mixed his musical forays into synthesizers with vocal parts of industrial or natural sounds, unaccompanied by instrumental improvisations and radio samples. The result is the audio equivalent of an art installation.
His first piece for public use, Trying to Think, was a synthesized meditation inspired by a woman's imagined sense of emptiness and loss after hearing the news of two boys drowning on the radio. The work first appeared on NPR in 1977.
In an interview with Ear Magazine, the new music magazine where she was a radio editor in the late 1980s, Ms. Torrington compared mixing and matching sounds from her natural environment to splicing genes to create a new living thing. . "The overall effect," he said, "is to create history, not in the way we understand history, but in a different kind of history that touches an emotional level."
His audio compositions were often part of multimedia collaborations with musicians and artists. One of these shows, Adrift, which incorporated elements of early virtual reality technology, was performed live at festivals and venues such as New York's New Museum and streamed online in various iterations between 1997 and 2001. The only thing the play didn't contain was scripted dialogue: synth hums punctuated by pleas. Seagulls, lapping waves, and deck sounds like intercom commands and tailwinds signaling the terror of being lost at sea and the faint hope of rescue.
His works often focused on the disastrous consequences of human domination over nature. He told Ear Press. "My work is about the loss of the natural environment, which I contribute to as a creator of artificial worlds." "And I can use any voice for that."
Helen Louise Torrington was born in Philadelphia on November 16, 1928, the second of four children of attorneys Richard Torrington and Catherine (Moffat) Torrington.
In addition to Mrs. Green, she is survived by a sister, Florence Williams.
After receiving a degree in biblical history from Wellesley College in 1950, he moved to New York, where he worked as an editor in book publishing and held various positions. In the mid-1960s, he earned doctorates in English literature from various institutions, including Rutgers University, but instead of the required dissertation, he decided to write a novel that was never published.
In the mid-1970s, while still a writer living in Towanda, Pennsylvania, Ms. Torrington hired her first synthesizer for a children's musical she wrote, The Frog Hollow Ghost. This was the beginning of a new direction in his career, and throughout the 1980s his work was played on student and community radio stations across the country and on stations in Europe and Australia, as well as at electronic music festivals.
He has often performed live, collaborating with choreographers such as Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane, artists like Jackie Apple and directors like Barbara Hammer. He provided the on-air score for the 16mm film Optic Nerve, which premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1987 and was shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York that same year.
When funding for broadcast arts began to decline in the 1990s, Ms. Torrington turned her attention to the Internet. In 1996, he founded the influential online art site Turbulence.org, which provided funding and a distribution platform for emerging web artists. It thrived in the new environment, using the openness of the Internet to reach a wider audience and interact or even collaborate with users.
Whether it's on the radio or online, Torrington says, sound conveys a sense of place and geography even as it floats through the air, which he says is important in today's culture, where people are more mobile than ever.
"Everywhere in our lives, the sense of community is melting away," he said in a 1998 interview. "It does not mean that there is no need for it. I think sound is a way to create a space that people can walk into and feel like they know, if only in imagination, where they are.
