Abstracts
Nigel Helyer - The Nomadic Ear
"The Nomadic Ear" is concerned with concepts of spatiality, of location and the interactions of sounding bodies that articulate and activate the soundscape; how we as auditors experience the sonic domain and how we as authors compose and construct compelling, immersive audioscapes.
We will consider strategies and methodologies for the design and composition of sonic narratives in non-linear environments; for example the design of immersive soundscapes, within installations that employ multiple parallel soundtexts; and in particular new compositional methods for building terrain-based mobile location sensitive audio experiences.
This presentation will examine the construction of sound narratives, together with the mechanisms for engaging with and experiencing, spatially distributed audioworks. I shall use my own creative and research projects that exhibit various forms of Immersion to tease out these issues, using four basic approaches that are categorised as follows:
- Three-dimensional speaker arrays with dynamic spatial audio.
- Environmental and public soundart projects.
- Interactive multi-channel projects.
- Location sensitive terrain-based spatial audio research.
These four categories of soundart projects each deal with issues of immersion and with the construction of narrative and modes of interaction in a variety of ways. Each work category describing different strategies for composition and content development for immersive environments and identifies varying auditor experiences, highlighting concepts of Linearity and Non-linearity and changing perceptions of locale and locatedness.
The works also allude to the changes in concepts of sonic immersion particularly in reference to Public Space by indicating how the technologies of audio transmission and reproduction have increasingly enabled and encouraged forms of privatized and selective hearing affecting a withdrawal from the Sonic Commons.
Sherre Delys - Pool
Pool is a media-sharing web project being developed by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's, Radio National in partnership with University of Technology Sydney.
Project Lead Sherre DeLys will discuss Pool as a test-bed fostering open source interactions between ABC and creative content communities, and a research project investigating the public broadcaster's changing role as a vital player in Australia's Information Commons.
Kirsten Reese - Hallenfelder
As one example of my recent work which is situated between installation, performance and electronic composition, I will discuss Hallenfelder. Hallenfelder (hall-fields) is an audio-video installation incorporating a wave field synthesis array with 20 loudspeakers, presented at the festival Donaueschinger Musiktage 2006. It uses recordings from nine community halls where concerts and installations take place during the annual festival, the oldest and one of the biggest contemporary music festivals in Europe. Both the sounds of the empty halls and sounds from communal activities not related to the festival that take place in these halls during the rest of the year (like cow auctions, blood donations, carnival parties, various sports events etc.) are featured in this site-specific work. The atmosphere of the empty spaces, their animated silence is captured and transformed. Moreover, the 'aura' of empty rooms appears to come from what has already taken place in the space and what might take place in the future. Moments of acoustic and visual recordings taken from various events in the halls are interspersed across the work. Audio and video are often not syncronized so that sound and image flit either across the projection screen or through the loudspeakers in a quasi-ghostlike manner. The focus of the work lies in the play between representation and visual and musical abstraction with, concrete' sound material.