Sound Installation Research Articles

Using soundscape simulation to evaluate compositions for a public space sound installationa).

While urban sound management often focuses on sound as a nuisance, soundscape research suggests that proactive design approaches involving sound art installations can enhance public space experience. Nevertheless, there is no consensus on a methodology to inform the composition of sound installations through soundscape evaluation, and little research on the effect of composition strategies on soundscape evaluation. The present study is part of a research-creation collaboration around the design of a permanent sound installation in an urban public space in Paris (Niches Acoustiques by Nadine Schütz). We report on a laboratory study involving the evaluation of composition sketches prior to the deployment of the installation on-site. Participants familiar with the public space (N = 20) were exposed to Higher-Order Ambisonics recordings of the site, to which compositions of the sound installation pertaining to different composition strategies were added using a soundscape simulation tool. We found three principal components relevant for evaluating and comparing sound installation sketches: pleasantness, familiarity and variety. Further, all composition sketches had a significant effect on the soundscape's familiarity and variety, and the effect of the compositions on these two components was stronger when composition strategies involved abstract sounds (sounds which were not clearly identifiable).

Shaping city soundscapes: In situ comparison of four sound installations in an urban public space

The soundscape approach considers sound as a resource from a user perspective in the planning of public spaces. While this approach is garnering increased research attention, practitioners rarely integrate sound into their practice beyond noise mitigation. Yet, sound design of public spaces has long been a major focus of sound installation artists, who offer creative site-specific interventions to (re)design public spaces. In this study, we present the systematic evaluation and comparison of four temporary sound installations deployed over two consecutive summers in the same urban public space. The sound installations featured compositions by the artist collective Audiotopie using different combinations of ambient music, nature, and vocal sounds. To measure the effects of the sound installations on users’ experience, we deployed 825 questionnaires including soundscape ratings and sound source listings. The results show that all four sound installations improved the public space’s soundscape, with commonalities (increased calmness and pleasantness, decreased perceived loudness) and specificities (increased sense of being-away for one installation, increased extent-coherence and reduced ratings for chaotic for another) related to compositional and contextual factors, such as the intended design goals, users’ location, or the presence of construction noise. As well, three of the four installations distracted participants from other non-dominant sound sources such as construction works, air conditioners, but also birds and human voices. Overall, the results confirm that sound installations can have a common enhancing effect on the experience of public space users, in addition to specific, tailored effects to reinforce the intended design goals in public spaces.

Sonic Gathering Place: implementation of a biophilic soundscape design and its evaluation

The Sonic Gathering Place (SGP) is a prototype urban furniture installation that uses sound design to enhance the biophilic effects of plants. It uses field recordings from four different biomes in South-Eastern Australia mixed with plants that are representative of those biomes. The SGP has a circular seating structure comprising four integrated planter boxes, each with a single speaker. Nature-based field recordings play through the four-speaker array to create an immersive audio playback experience, though without masking the existing acoustic environment of the installation site. This paper focuses, as practice-led research, on the design process of the installation that encompasses four disciplinary approaches: soundscape design, biophilic design, field recording and urban furniture. Innovatively, it then reports a quantitative survey of the user’s experience of the SGP that hones understanding of human response to the design. Measured user-responses to the SGP, collected through a smartphone-based questionnaire, were overwhelmingly affirmative of the design, including a positive change in self-reported mood resulting from the visit to the SGP. These responses were observed with introduced sound levels set only marginally louder than sound levels that existed before the installation. The results signal a wider role that biophilic sound installations might play in urban landscape design.

Encruzilhadas: we believe in crossroads – Brazil at PQ23

ABSTRACT This article delves into the research and creative process involved in shaping Brazil's representation at the Exhibition of Countries and Regions during the 15th Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space. This collective effort aimed to integrate artists and researchers from across Brazil, resonating with the concept of crossroads, where differences converge and coexist. The curatorial team, attuned to the richness and plurality of Brazilian sonic landscapes, endeavoured to expand representativeness and diversity of perspectives and foster meaningful exchanges. The process aimed to address systemic and historical invisibilities, daring cross-cutting perspectives and dynamics, thus showcasing the wisdom embedded in the diverse manifestations of Brazilian identity. Exploring the creative process for a sound installation and seven sound offerings, alongside the site-specific relationship with the venue, exhibition design, and audience reception, the article elucidates the connections with Brazilian and Latin American authors and thoughts.

All that is solid melts into air (Salton Sea), 2017

This paper is an analysis of the artist Sadia Sadia’s 5’54” filmed loop three channel digital video and surround sound installation ‘all that is solid melts into air (Salton Sea)’ filmed at the Salton Sea, Coachella Valley, California in 2017. Integrating a practice that has included music production, sound design and fine art filmed installation, the artist examines the Salton Sea as a site of ecological devastation undergoing drought amplified by the climate crisis. The drying lake exposes ‘Salton Sea dust’ which contains a mix of arsenic, selenium, chromium, zinc, lead and DDT as a consequence of industrialised agricultural activity. The filmed installation employs aesthetic ‘methodologies of transcendence’ to initiate sublime, transcendent and epiphanic states, grounded in practice-based artistic research as well as existing sociological, psychological and neuroscientific research. Through an examination of the filmed installation work, the artist interrogates whether there is an element of the sacred that can be found in ecological devastation and whether the redemptive power of awe can lead from individual epiphany through to meaningful collective change. The submission is of a creative work of practice-based research with an accompanying expository text by a practicing artist and filmmaker.

One size does not fit all: Three tools and approaches for soundscape simulations

We present a reflection on three prototypes of real-time interactive soundscape simulators aimed at supporting participatory urban sound planning and interventions. These prototypes were developed as part of the Sounds in the City cross-sectoral partnership through an iterative process involving various stakeholders. Each prototype enables different ways to manipulate soundscapes through tailored interfaces and audio/visual outputs, targeting different types of users. The first version is audio-only and uses live music tools for Ambisonics spatialization, with limited environmental modeling for co-design exercises with urban and sound professionals. The second version builds on the idea of the first and adds acoustic modeling. It was used to assess the impact of sound installations in public spaces through research-creation involving sound artists and residents. The last version utilizes (desktop or head-mounted) virtual reality with binaural rendering, immersing the user in an audio-visual city to raise sound awareness and support urban soundscape design. We emphasize that there is no one-size-fits-all tool. Rather, we highlight how different tools are needed for different auralization tasks and target user groups. These tools are presented through examples of early-stage conceptualization, educational components, creative processes, laboratory-based soundscape assessments, and both individual and participatory design sessions.

Subtle Sound Design: Designing for Experience Blend in a Historic House Museum

In this article, we present and discuss a user-study prototype, developed for the Bakkehuset historic house museum in Copenhagen. We examine how the prototype—a digital sound installation—can expand visitors’ experiences of the house and offer encounters with immaterial cultural heritage. Historic house museums often hold back on utilizing digital communication tools inside the houses, since a central purpose of this type of museum is to preserve an original environment. Digital communication tools, however, hold great potential for facilitating rich encounters with cultural heritage and in particular with the immaterial aspects of museum collections and their histories. In this article, we present our design steps and choices, aiming at subtly and seamlessly adding a digital dimension to a historic house. Based on qualitative interviews, we evaluate how the sound installation at Bakkehuset is sensed, interpreted, and used by visitors as part of their museum experience. In turn, we shed light on the historic house museum as a distinct design context for designing hybrid visitor experiences and point to the potentials of digital communication tools in this context.

CONCEPTUAL MUSIC: NEW MEDIA AND FRONTIERS IN MARYANNE AMACHER’S CITY-LINKS SERIES

AbstractBetween 1967 and 1988 Maryanne Amacher's City-Links series comprised radio broadcasts, sound installations and interdisciplinary performances featuring her practice of mixing sonic material from multiple remote locations joined via telecommunications infrastructure. These works reflect Amacher's compositional elevation of the process of sonic perception alongside musical material, an approach that would evolve to inform her later work in which she dealt with the musical potential of psychoacoustic phenomena known as auditory distortion products. This article aims to provide an overview of the City-Links series as a unique product of the experimentation in post-war avant-garde music and visual and conceptual art. After a synopsis of Amacher's early compositional development, I offer a comparison between Amacher's City-Links and John Cage's radio works, exploring different contemporary approaches to transmission and broadcast as a compositional medium. I then situate the site-specificity of the City-Links works within the extramusical frame offered by Amacher's contemporary Robert Smithson's site/non-site dialectic. The article finally suggests the necessity for a more holistic examination of Amacher's legacy that accounts for both the musicological and art-historical implications of her work.

Buzzing like a bee: simulation and cross-species empathy in sound installations

ABSTRACT Recent sound installations at major international museums and public venues simulate the sounds of the European honeybee. In this article, I discuss how and to what effect “buzz” is used in selected installations in London, New York, and Montréal. In these immersive works, listeners are invited to “be a bee” and mimic behaviours such as flight, pollination, and hive activity. The works suggest that to behave like a bee is to empathise with a bee’s experience – an exercise that cultivates compassion and, possibly, activism. Reflecting on these installations and my experiences thereof, I consider the possibility of cross-species empathy through methods of simulation, immersion, and witnessing.

Racism and the representation of the murder of Stephen Lawrence in audio: An analysis of audience experience of the immersive story environment

This article investigates the power of audio as a storytelling medium and its capacity to provide immersive narrative-based experiences. In particular, it examines the potential of immersive or spatial audio to engage young people with the complex and pressing issue of racism by focusing on the artwork [re]locate: a multi-channel sound installation revisiting the racially motivated murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993. [re]locate metaphorically places the audience at the bus stop where Stephen Lawrence was attacked, and allows them to experience an audio-only reconstruction of events associated with his murder and its aftermath. Based on a reflexive thematic analysis of the qualitative feedback elicited after encounters with the artwork, the article seeks to understand young people’s perspectives on events, their sense of engagement with the story and the aesthetic and technical features of the installation that create a sense of immersion, and induce presence. It argues that the perceived potency of the artwork and its ability to engage young people with the issue not only resides in the inherent qualities of sound, but also in the capacity of the spatial audio design of the installation to heighten the sense of immersion, induce presence and enhance cognitive and emotional perspective taking.

Urban Intonation: Listening to the Rats of New York City

Abstract From urbanization to biomedical science, rats can be found in the foundations of modernity. Communicating ultrasonically above the ~20 kHz frequency limit of human hearing, rats are also well adapted for the human-built environment and its anthropogenic noise. For the sound installation Urban Intonation, the author recorded rats on the streets of New York City with an ultrasonic microphone and resampled and remixed the audio for playback over a human public address system. Repositioning rat sounds as something recognizable, if not intelligible, as speech prompts humans to reconsider their relationship to their oftreviled nonhuman cohabitants.

Gender and Deterritorialized Identity

This article explores the immersive audio-visual and sculptural art installations in the 59th Venice Biennale (2022) of three transnational contemporary women artists with familial ties to former colonies and protectorates. The Afro-Caribbean artist Sonia Boyce, MBE, presented Feeling Her Way in the British National Pavilion, for which she won the Golden Lion, the biennale’s highest honor. Zineb Sedira, a Franco-Algerian artist who lives and works in Britain, exhibited Les rêves n’ont pas de titre (Dreams Have No Titles) in the French National pavilion. The Moroccan artist, Latifa Echakhch, who was raised in France and lives in Switzerland, represented Switzerland with Le Concert, a sculptural sound installation. Each of their multidisciplinary installations engages differently with the intersections of race, gender, and ethnicity to challenge cultural stereotypes and erasures—of women artists and histories of liberation struggles. This article introduces early works by each artist as a basis for understanding how their biennale projects are decolonial and feminist in order to argue that the deterritorialized may reterritorialize—create new spaces of enunciation—in and through culture. The Venice Biennale installations of Boyce, Sedira, and Echakhch bring light to intersections of present-day and historical politics and memory by engaging with identity—individual and collective—as constructed, negotiated, and always in flux. Their work is shaped by migration, displacement, refugee status, exile, and the frontier as site of obstruction and passage.

Sound-vibration: Relations between bodies, low frequencies, and multisensory experiments

Multimodality research has enabled academics to propose and support new ideas in multiple modes for interpretation, communication, and as an important part of art education. In this piece, multimodal listening is situated as a transcendence of ear-centric approaches and the use of vibration as a poetic practice in contemporary art. As a result, sonic arts and sound experience principles are used to talk about everyday sounds in new and immersive ways, encouraging the audience to disrupt established sensorial boundaries. Subsequently, sound-vibration can be interrelated as a mode of multimodality and as a resource for meaning-making in possible contemporary practices. If perception is considered multifaceted, one could notice the world as an integration of conscious or unaware inputs. In the experience of sound installations, one may explore oscillations as a valuable channel for understanding multimodal approaches since, unlike visual or tactile interactions, the relationship between sound and the body hinges on fully embodied situations. The underlying thought in this piece will emerge from two recent art pieces, that produce atmospheres and blur the concrete division of senses, transversely representing the potential of the low frequencies.

A Dialogue with Walter Meierjohann on Theatre, Installation, and Binaural Sound

This dialogue explores the possibilities of binaural sound for contemporary theatre making and museum curation, situating sonic modes of practice in relation to particular formal experimentations demanded by the context of pandemic and exemplified by the international touring production of Blindness first staged at the Donmar Warehouse in London in 2020, and directed by Walter Meierjohann. The discussion between Meierjohann and Georgina Guy opens up the potential of sound installation as an apposite form through which to challenge visual-centric cultures of production and stage particular political and theatrical challenges, related to ideas of community and responsibility, and imagination, collaboration, and collective experience.

Floors of Heaven: A case study of an underwater acoustic soundscape for recreational purposes

This paper presents a case study of an underwater music piece titled “Floors of Heaven” by British artist Leon Vynehall. This installation was delivered in a swimming pool as part of the Mona Foma 2023 festival, representing an example of the use of soundscapes as a means of artistic expression. The study delves into contemporary trends in soundscapes, with a focus on their utilization as a recreational tool, as the writers observe the growing interest in creating immersive and experiential art installations that engage the viewer on a sensory and emotional level. Subsequently, the paper discusses how soundscapes can be delivered in underwater environments, which present unique challenges in terms of acoustics, sound propagation, and environmental risk factors such as hearing damage. The technical considerations involved in creating an underwater sound installation, including the use of hydrophones and underwater speakers, and the importance of selecting appropriate hardware to achieve acceptable noise levels underwater, are thoroughly described. The case study of “Floors of Heaven,” which uses a combination of field recordings and synthesized sounds to explore themes of ecological collapse and the impact of human activity on underwater environments, is then presented.

Creating with ‘voice without subject’: An aesthetic reconceptualization of voice

This methodological paper connects posthuman conceptualizations of voice with artistic research and examines whether it opens toward different registers and levels of embodied and aesthetic forms of knowing that cut across normative accounts of what it means to know. We start from what Patti Lather calls ‘a praxis of stuck places’ and ask how to give voice to experiences such as chronic illness and pain, while at the same time disrupting representational forms of illness and pain. To investigate this, we first critically engage with the popular genre of the health diary and its representational form. Secondly, we explore how Lisa A. Mazzei concept of ‘voice without subject’ can support us in disrupting the normative and representational production of voice, while working with a failing voice. Finally, we analyze the sound installation, A Borrowed Diary—made by M. Broeckmeyer, and explore how it opens up alternative approaches to voice and chronic pain. We will argue that making ‘voice without subject’ work, touch, and resonate can impact the lives of people who often remain unheard, in that it acknowledges experiences and expressions that are mostly not validated. Creating with ‘voice without subject’ makes tangible how personal experiences, however, temporarily, contribute to the bigger picture of how we look at and listen to people with illnesses and/or disabilities.

Aural Resilience

In 2018, the artist Chen Ting-Jung (b 1985) manufactured a sound installation that reclaimed the Beishan Broadcast Wall in Kinmen, Taiwan. Constructed in 1967, the wall’s seventeen loudspeakers broadcast political propaganda across a narrow stretch of water to the People’s Republic of China for three decades. In recognition of the sonic Cold War, Chen stripped down this fortress into its rudiments: a horizontal arc of speakers, playing one of Taiwanese cultural icon Teresa Teng’s famous solo pieces. She titled the installation You Are the Only One I Care About (Whisper). This article explores this reclamation, where the questions about the exploitation of female labour and the aestheticisation of the female voice confront the aurality of the Cold War. I argue that the female voice became a specific site of production during the sonic combat between the Taiwan Strait. Most importantly, I investigate how Chen’s intervention is both a feminist critique and a form of sonic resilience that is open to different political possibilities.

Psofotopias

Psofotopias is an essay that observes how different media, cultural artifacts, and narratives depict dreams and the act of dreaming. I connect these popular media examples to critiques of contemporary technology and media theory, to brain science and philosophy of noise, and I conclude with a commentary on one of my recent art installations. This text is inspired by an interview with Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter published under the title “Dreamful Computing”, which takes a quote by the late Bernard Stiegler as its prompt: “In order to do politics today, we must dream”. Their overall interest is that of “designing theories that don’t disavow the uncertainty, noise, and contingency of the situation of media”, an interest that I align with in refusing the often clear-cut separation of dreams and nightmares into either utopias or dystopias. By treating dreams with moral indeterminacy, a space for interpretation, analogy, and (trans)individuation is opened up. This space of ambiguity and uncertainty is what I call a “psofotopia”. Psofotopia is a portmanteau (psofos, noise; topos, place) that allows me to argue that dreams, with their cognitive, interpretive, and affective ambiguity, are “spaces of noise” that offer a model to deal with complexity. The dreaming, and its hallucinatory qualities, produces a para-conceptual and para-real psofotopia, a space that triggers collisions and clashes between the immaterial and the physical. An analogy can be drawn between the para-reality of dreams and that of the virtual space, initially imagined by cyberpunk authors as a consensual hallucination that would free humans from their bodily constraints, and eventually developed into an expensive technological infrastructure that aims to perpetuate interpassivity. I will conclude with a discussion about my new work, NNNV XR, an expanded dream that utilizes VR in combination with a sound installation and custom-made transducing furniture producing haptic signals. The installation connects the virtual and the physical world, allowing the experiencer to dream along my dreams. By navigating the sensorial inputs of NNNV XR, the experiencer inhabits the multimedia psofotopia I propose while being aware of the threads that connect the immaterial and the tangible through the para-real.

Gapassipi

Gapassipi

Introduction

Introduction| March 01 2023 Introduction: Words from the Editor Jay Needham, MFA Jay Needham, MFA Jay Needham is an artist, musician, and cultural producer who utilizes multiple creative platforms to produce his works. As a hearing-divergent person, Needham explores present and emerging ecologies of the electromagnetic spectrum that often feature the sense of sound and vibration as a component in the interpretation of his works. His sound art, works for radio, visual art, performances, and installations have appeared worldwide at museums, festivals, and on the airwaves. His most recent sound installation is on permanent display in the BioMuseo, designed by Frank Gehry in the Republic of Panama. Needham’s writing appears in the books Hearing Places: Sound, Place, Time, Culture and Moving Sounds: A Cultural History of the Car Radio. His research has been published in Exposure, Soundscape: The Journal of Acoustic Ecology and Leonardo Music Journal. Needham is a professor in the School of Media Arts at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He received his MFA from the School of Art at California Institute of the Arts. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Resonance (2023) 4 (1): 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1525/res.2023.4.1.1 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Jay Needham; Introduction: Words from the Editor. Resonance 1 March 2023; 4 (1): 1–5. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/res.2023.4.1.1 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentResonance Search As I introduce the fourth volume of Resonance, I’m very proud to welcome the newest members of the journal’s editorial board. These sound studies scholars and artists add to the diversity of perspectives as we continue to explore cultural boundaries and expand upon the concept of sound as a living, cultural force. Throughout our fourth volume we will be presenting a new special series, “Queer Politics & Positionalities in Sonic Art.” The series will be guest edited by Charles Eppley (they/he), assistant teaching professor of Interdisciplinary Arts & Performance at Arizona State University and co-editor and research coordinator for the Proclaiming Disability Arts initiative at the NYU Center for Disability Studies. Their work will be assisted by a diverse team of scholars and artists from within the Resonance community. “Queer Politics & Positionalities in Sonic Art” asks vitally important questions such as, Does queer sound exist, and are there... You do not currently have access to this content.