The River Thames is often reduced to a visual backdrop. Submerged, it is a dense acoustic field where anthropogenic noise overwhelms the delicate sounds of living water. Drawing on R. Murray Schafer's concept of the soundscape, Waterline divides that noise into two movements — disruption and attunement — drawn from a nine-minute hydrophone recording near Blackfriars railway bridge, where boat motors and Thameslink trains reach below the waterline.
The first is an interactive installation: a 45-litre tank, a miniature stand-in for the Thames, holds a live hydrophone. Listeners introduce sound and vibration into the water, and the hydrophone signal distorts a video of the river in real time. Collapsing the distance between human action and sonic consequence, the listener's body becomes the source of disturbance.
The second is a digital performance: a screen recording of the hydrophone track edited in iZotope RX11. Drawing on Lefebvre's rhythmanalysis, the edit separates the river's cyclical rhythms from the linear, mechanical rhythms of human infrastructure to reach an acoustic Thames that has become inaudible.
Together, they borrow Mark Fell's structure-and-synthesis framework: the tank stages disruption and the performance enacts attunement. Between them, the Thames becomes audible as what it is, and what it can no longer be.
