The Shore Remembers

Created over 12 months, this immersive binaural headphone-listening experience documents the rhythms of the shore and humanity’s impact upon it.

Audiences are invited into a recreation of Anthony’s Nose, a beach on the Mornington Peninsula, to sit on the dunes and listen deeply to the sounds of the shifting landscape through time.

You’ll be taken on a thirty minute sonic journey from the solitude of winter, its swells, storms, and silence through to the summer’s peak filled with jet skis, children laughing, and warm bodies pushed tightly together.

This unique coastal environment has been impacted by changes in the weather, rising tides, and a massive dredging operation in 2006 which saw 40 million cubic metres of the seabed removed. By capturing the impacts of climate collapse firsthand, The Shore Remembers seeks to shift our perception of the crisis — from a distant, abstract concern to something immediate, intimate, and unfolding in our own backyards.

The work was recorded by Narrm-based sound artist Olivia Fisher near her childhood home on Port Phillip Bay using a 3Dio Free Space binaural microphone. This specialised device, shaped like a human head with microphones positioned in each ear, captures sound in a way that mirrors how we naturally hear — producing a deeply immersive, spatially accurate experience. Unlike other recording technologies, binaural audio offers an uncanny sense of presence; listeners don’t just hear the shoreline, they are transported to it. Fisher describes this as an act of ‘deep listening’ — an embodied, affective experience that invites audiences to slow down, attune to subtle sonic details, and reconsider their memories and assumptions about familiar places.