It was during his residency that Beer began recruiting a choral phalanx who would form the basis of a video work for the Art Gallery of NSW.

Composition for Mouths (Songs My Mother Taught Me) is a filmed vocal performance. In pairs, four singers used a new, physical vocalisation technique. Locking their lips, each pair formed a single, collaborative vocal cavity, breathing and reverberating together. “I asked them to find each other’s resonant frequencies, like I’d done with architecture,” says Beer. As two voices converged, the singers produced the phenomenon of ‘beating’, a “violent, interesting and almost percussive” throbbing effect, caused by the friction of adjacent frequencies. Composition is both a two-headed instrument and a radically intimate duet.

To write the score, Beer interviewed his singers, asking for their earliest memories of melody. Their answers indicate Australia’s multicultural musical heritage: a children’s hymn; an Indian raga; medieval composer Hildegard; an atonal indigenous songline. “It was important that the music was tied to the people performing it,” says Beer. “That single principle was enough to push me further than I’d gone before musically.”