They say you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. Assuming you disapprove of food waste, it could be equally true that you can’t hear the sound of eggs breaking without making an omelet…or at least, that is the essential idea behind Three Egg Omelet.

The sounds we hear in daily life – things like bacon frying, doors opening and shutting, or trash bags rustling – often either go completely unnoticed, or strike us as meaningless byproducts of our actions. Similarly, the physical actions musicians perform to produce sounds, though frequently admired in their own right, are rarely seen as having any intentional meaning in themselves; instead, they are merely the best means of achieving a specific sonic end.

When percussionist Kyle Hughes first asked me to compose this “cooking piece” for him, it struck me that a percussionist playing a musical composition and a chef preparing a recipe perform remarkably similar actions with remarkably similar sonic results, yet our experiences of these two performances differ greatly. In the former, what we see is an accompaniment of lesser importance to what we hear, and in the later, what we hear is an accompaniment of lesser importance to what we see (and, ultimately, what we taste). So what happens when these two experiences are blended in such a way that this hierarchy of the senses becomes ambiguous? I set out to answer this question by writing a piece for Kyle that asks the viewer/listener to see gestures as music and hear sounds as the ingredients of a recipe. The end result is meant to be disorienting, and hopefully tasty…