Sara Pinheiro
acousmatic
ASYNC
ASYNC is a live performance that combines foley and sampling, field recording and audio morphing. Based on the ideas of sonic fiction, it is an acousmatic experience of a film that has not been done – and if it were, it would be asynchronous. It’s a confusion where one sound might sound like another, a sound as-if, a magnified detail and everything that shakes (crumbles into dust).
ASYNC is also the return of a promise, a function that retrieves a value and resolves it. It’s a hold back.
The performance is a release of Pinheiro’s first attempt to make an EP. It consists of 6 individual pieces organised (and failing) as the format of a (foley) song. It invites critical listening and ear cleaning.
Coming soon at PAF 2024.
paws grebovka
2024 – 7′ – CZ
This composition is made walking through the park with a binaural set. It focuses on the perspective of the many dogs that visit this park daily. By default, it also includes their humans and a few other elements.
It was commissioned by EBU for World’s Environmental Day.
Many thanks to Ladislav Železný.
SLAM
2023 – 20′ – CZ/PT
SLAM, “sounds like a movie”, is a fixed-media acousmatic composition for 5.1 Dolby Theatres made of film sounds. It plays with a sense of cultural memory by referencing well-known films in a stream of sonic associations in a format that is the standard approach of multichannel sound in cinema. In that sense, the composition questions a few assumptions that established themselves during the years of film sound history, namely the patterns that define that history. It puts forward an idea of collective memory in film culture in a semi-historical approach of film sound as a story-telling tool. The composition hops from film to film in a chain of personal associations, either driven by the sound itself or by the film per se.
SLAM is an étude au cinema as much as an ode to film sound while being, literally, cinema for the ears.
Screenings:
- 21 June 2024 @ Cinemateca Portuguesa, Lisbon. Program note (in Portuguese), available here.
- 17 February 2024 @ Eletroacoustic Music Festival, Bangor – Wales, UK
- The original 5.1 version has been adapted into a 30 channel installation to be exhibited at GHMP, Prague.
- 30 November 2023 @ Ponrepo, Prague (premiere)
SLAM is now available online (and below), an article published by ILUMINACE.
reticências
2022 – stereo + 6 bluetooth speakers – 30 min
reticências explores FM, noise, repetition, rhythm and randomness. It is an unfinished sentence, a never-ending story, it’s a continuation, a transition in between. It departs from a broken radio that speaks on its own towards the exploration of its patterns and spatial findings. It is noise and texture. It is a sonic drama.
The original radio recording is played “untouched” from the bluetooth speakers and it can be heard here on archive.org. In the main P.A. system… I answer it.
The full performance is available in video thanks to Punctum/Radim Labuda.
The bluetooth speakers are from Synth Library Prague. Thanks to Mary C.
Performed at
- AUSLAND (Berlin, GE), Jan 2025;
- Dx10 (Prague, Cz), Jan 2023;
- MeetFactory (Prague, Cz) on Nov 2022;
- Moozak (Vienna, Austria) on Oct 2022;
- Prisma Estúdio (Lisbon, Pt) Set 2022;
- SONOSCOPIA (Porto, Pt) on August 2022;
- Punctum (Prague, Cz) on April 2022.

SARA PINHEIRO live at Punctum from Punctum on Vimeo.
treatise of a purr
2015 – 17 channels – 60 min
Treatise of a purr is a play in three acts. It starts with curiosity did nothing to the cat, follows with the cat and the glove and ends with a scalded cat, who was said to be afraid of cold water. The scalded cat is the final act, which completes the “treatise of a purr”. In it, the cat returns to face a new element. May fire walk with him.
Although each act can be played autonomously, they depend on one another to formulate its sense. The piece uses a variable arrangement of loudspeakers, in three different sets. It is an exercise of “sound theatre” as a result of “staging sound fiction”.
the cat and the glove
2014 – front array/back array – 20 min
For it is the second act, it follows the idea of a main character established in “curiosity did nothing to the cat”. However, that character did not follow a logic social context previously, and so it continues. This piece is searching for ways to frame sound, in its specificity and detail, as a sonic scanner willing to find an internal logic in its own fictionality.
The sounds in use are a slightly counter-intuitive of agglomerated sounds and their hermitic same in content and form.
curiosity did nothing to the cat
2012 – 7 channels – 12 min
This piece is made for 7 speakers, which are placed under the audience’s seats. This first part is ca. 10 minutes long and it is the beginning of “teatrise of a purr” which lasts ca. 60 minutes and works the idea of sound theater.
side walk
2012-15 – 5 channels – 20 min
This piece aims at riding the listener through a walk that should sound both familiar and foreign. The sounds have a strong visual reference, for it is objectively abstract.
This composition started as an attempt to find balance between the idea (the abstraction) and the material itself (the object), thinking of the legitimacy of the former and the possibilities of the latter. It aims at generating different sensibilities in relation to reality and fiction. It is a walk, which starts after its beginning and ends before it is over. It wanders between what is present and what is not, what was been included or not; and how much weight can absence have.
s’wing lives
2011 – 8 channels – 19 min
an exercise in the concepts of sound documentary and sound fiction. it aims to be a pleasant journey into this universe of sounds, until one is able to liberate oneself and the sounds from any referential logics.
: swing lives is my first multichannel work.
: s’wing lives was awarded the 1st prize in the category of “electronic sonorities” @ FIM.