uncertainty is a spatial sound composition that aims to portray a feeling of uncertainty and the ways in which people cope with it. The inspiration for the piece is derived from life during the pandemic; from the drastic changes the author’s career went through, aiming to devote herself to music full-time; and from the conversations she had with her sister while writing her Master’s thesis “Experience of people with the obsessive-compulsive disorder during the COVID-19 pandemic”. For people with OCD, coping with the unknown is quite demanding, and for all of these reasons, for tonota, uncertainty became a loud background noise that was difficult to assuage. tonota portrays a sense of uncertainty in its overwhelming feeling of confusion and loss of clear judgment, employing rhythmic patterns and other sonic elements to depict ways in which people try to find comfort in establishing order where there is none. Her compositional techniques have been influenced by Beatrice Dillon’s piece Workaround and Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians.
The work was commissioned and produced by KONTEJNER, and it was developed during the artist residency at Bergen Centre for Electronic Arts - BEK.
tonota (HR)
Producer and musician Ivona Eterović, artistic name tonota, began her musical journey in the electronic rap duo Playground Hustle, after which she started working independently, expanding the genre boundaries of her musical expression. Tonota's unconventional approach to club music, along with more frequent experimentation and avoidance of club rules, results in an interesting combination of ambient and bass music, occasionally influenced by traditional music.
Among her own performances, tonota highlights live acts at the Illectricity Festival, ZEZ Festival, Music Biennale Zagreb and SHIP Festival, as well as collaborations with Summer Like The Season, Sara Renar, Ana Hušman and I.M. Klif, and Stephany Stefan.
In 2021, tonota attended a multi-channel sound diffusion workshop, led by Miodrag Gladović, after which she started exploring spatialization of sound and created her first spatial-sound compositions. She performed on the complex multi-channel speaker system Vienna Acousmonium, in Ljubljana.
In recent years, Eterović has been composing music for theater and film, and in 2024 she enrolled master study of Sound Design at the Editing Department of the Academy of Dramatic Art in Zagreb.