sonic surrounds

from http://transition.turbulence.org/networked_music_review/2008/06/06/echolocation-a-site-specific-installation/

Echolocation:: a site specific Installation 2008 by Arnaud Jacobs :: Commissioned by Singuhr Hörgallerie, Berlin :: Electronic devices, subwoofers, rotating speakers, laptop, mixer :: Großer Wasserspeicher, Berlin :: As part of Tuned City Festival, 23 may to 13 july 2008.

The installation is in a former water reservoir located in Prenzlauerberg. The reservoir is very large and the acoustic fingerprint is unique. The architectural properties are very simply laid out, it consists of five concentric passages in the form of rings. The space is very complex to grasp. This is mainly because of an utilitarian architecture, which is based on function (holding water in the early days) rather than anthropomorphic proportions. All these elements have an unusual impact on perception and is at first disorientating. Soundwise it has huge reverberation and echo. Sound travels in different and therefore unpredictable directions. Sounds become very diffused.
Our spatial awareness is dependant of only a fraction of a second of a sound reflected in our environment. This intuitive information is quite rudimentary when navigate our environment and we are mostly unaccustomed to use it consciously and or adequately. Some animals, however, use it as their main navigation system. They ’see’ with their ears. The skill has been first discovered in the mid-eighteenth century. The term echolocation was introduced much later in the mid-twentieth century.

The idea for this installation is based on the concept that sound can be used for investigating acoustic and architectural properties. Sound can be also be used as a cue for loctation. In general sound will be applied as a tool for perception. For this installation I developped a device that is a kind of sound space investigator; the Echolocator.

The Echolocator incorporates a sound device, a laser tool and a communicating tracking device. It can emit short sounds that are optimal for echolocation. These sounds are based on sounds that animals use for echolocation. There will be in total a dozen of those devices. Each device will sound slightly different and will interact with each other.

With the Echolocator you are able to explore the acoustic and architectural properties of a given space with sound. This tool triggers our sonic perception and helps in understanding how sound and space correlates.

On Arnaud Jacobs:

Generally Jacobs sets out from a fascination for sound, in any form. This explains how he takes his raw material from reality: with a microphone and recorder he makes field recordings. With these fragments Jacobs composes on his computer. His sound works are the result of a research to the different aspects of concrete or daily- sounds and how to assimilate and tune this material to the context of a musical work. The sound hovers as some kind of an interaction between micro and macro, inside and outside, fieldwork and studio, reality and fictionalization.

Born in Wilrijk, Belgium, in 1968. Arnaud Jacobs lives and works in Brussels since 1995. He has studied architecture. After his studies at the Sint-Lucasinstituut it did not take long, however, before he chose music. Today he has released music under several aliases: MarkMancha (electronic music), missfit (assigned music for film and other media), tmrx (autonomous collages constructed from everyday sounds). From 2004 he has been working under the name Aernoudt Jacobs and concentrates on installations, performances, sound design and commissioned work for film, dance and theater.

In his installation work he investigates mostly correlations between sound, matter, space/location, perception and psychoacoustics. Since 2005 he is with - Benoit Deuxant, Anton Aeki, Johan Vandermaelen and Frederik De Wilde - a member of zoning. He has been performing in Belgium, France, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Mexico, New York, Norway. He has released two albums on critically acclaimed labels as Staalplaat (NL) and Selektion (D) and contributed on different compilations.

Perception is an important aspect in his sound work. Perceiving music, sound, harmonies is a physical, emotional and intellectual activity that is always linked to personal memories. The properties of a particular sound/music/… will change the values of perception for each individual and thus hearing a tune on the radio can have an as deep impact on perception as listening to a car passing by. This association is an ongoing preocupation that is visible in most of his work. With the aid of psychoacoustic theories, he explores how perception can be influenced and how to express sound physically, spatially and emotionally.08 (from http://www.tmrx.org/bio00.html)

Via the imminent Sydney Gang Festival’s blog, I discovered this great video of vibrating cornstarch (a “shear-thickening liquid” so I gather), forming persistent holes and “fingers”. Oh, and I think the relevance of this post on Gang Festival’s blog is laterally something to do with a “Ring of Fire” display of model volcanoes tonight (Thursday 10 January 6PM) at Gallery Fourtyfour Darlinghurst (see flier).

The totally amusing video below seems to be a funked-up remix of much drier videos over at revver (though I’m not sure these are the original source).

Makes me think of daydreams I’ve had of using audio-visual-haptic feedback to make audio-visual kinetic sculptures interactive with the sounds of viewers… (one more item on the list of things to try when I have more spare time)

Also reminds me of work with ferroliquids by Sachiko Kodama, Yasushi Miyajima - and others (examples here and here - with a mention of DIY ferroliquids made of [toxic] motor oil and laser printer toner).

Anyway, here’s the vid:

Andrea Polli, on her blog from an artist residency in Antarctia, posted an incredible sonified siesmometer recording of “Iceberg B15A” breaking up. The resulting sound poetically begins resembling a windswept desolate icescape, with sonar-like pings and deep submarine booms. Later it features moments of monumental tearing almost becoming a semi-organic, alien scream and later again, skittish gaseous sounds like dry ice on a hotplate…

You have to listen to it. This sound is an allegory of our times.

Andrea writes:

Dr. Douglas MacAyeal, Professor in the Department of the Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago sent me this moving sound file, as he describes:
“…that’s the sound of Iceberg B15A ‘breaking up’ (off Cape Adare, 27 October, 2005)…it’s really a seismometer record that’s been ’sped up’ by a factor of 1000 to make it audible.”

Author Website: http://www.andreapolli.com
Author Bio: Andrea Polli is a New York based artist whose work explores global systems.

The sound is linked into the media player below, from the original source at: http://90degrees.shashafeng.com/sound/B15As_exit_open.mp3

 Iceberg B15A breaking up, by Dr. Douglas MacAyeal, via Andrea Polli: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Michel Chion describes the term synchresis as… “the forging between something one sees and something one hears - it is the mental fusion between a sound and a visual when these occur at exactly the same time. Synchresis is an acronym formed by telescoping together the two words synchronism and synthesis”. (excerpt from: http://filmsound.org/chion/sync.htm)

ANAT, the Australian Network for Art and Technology has just launched its latest copy of Filter magazine (issue 66, [southern] summer 2007) with Synchresis the theme, with a special release DVD, and the launch (and xmas party) tonight at the Chauvel cinema in Paddington…

The launch featured masterful live performances from Peter Newman, Ian Andrews and Robin Fox. Fox in particular has blown me away yet again with new aural/visual brain-warping material drawn from laptop and relic of a Cathode Ray Oscilloscope (that induces quite some nostalgia for me as it’s the same model as ones I used to do electronic labs on in the mid 90s). Since I last saw the oscilloscope set, a few of his laser shows ago, the camera trained on the CRO seems to have zoomed closer to the dot that pulses with rough, almost DC modulations, beginning the set. The hazy grain of the CRO’s phosphors are accentuated with the green brightness gradients of arrhythmia-inducing, hard edged bass signals pumping from the laptop. The dot begins to pop around the screen on a coiled trajectory that leaves a sheen prompting me to wonder if this is still the analogue oscilloscope or some fantastic jitter-generated pixels driven by the tetchy sounds. Some time later, traces of earlier sets appear, yet the sounds are much faster, less tethered, yet more tightly mobile if that’s possible, jerked from image to image…. and I realise that in this synchresis, not only are the images made by the sounds, but I think the sounds are probably also made by the images - not in the realtime sense, but in the process of composition of the possibilities. It dawns on me that the sonic assault strikes these ears as quite novel itself - even without its visual counterpart - and that, while the Backscatter release made it clear that sounds were designed to make good images, this fact and much exploration has brought new sounds as well. The search for new images from the sounds and the design of improvisation possibilities has also created new electronic music, let alone this incredible aural-visual experience.

A set of photos from the Synchresis performance are up on my flickr.

For my PhD research, I’ve made a spatial audio localisation experiment that you can download and try yourself.

The software is available for Windows and Mac OSX, along with more information on my university website at the following URL:

http://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~nickm/index.php?Research::Static_Localisation_Experiment