Chapter 20
Acoustic Space, Community And Virtual Soundscapes
Barry Truax
Yolande Harris, “Satellite Sounders”
Yolande Harris Sun Run Sun: Satellite Sounding (2009) 3’36”
Harris’s “Satellite Sounders” are mobile devices that sonify the GPS navigation data broadcast by overhead satellites. As the listener walks around the environment the audio changes as the data are updated.
The first four pieces presented here are recordings (“Satellite Soundings”) made in four different locations: Singapore, Genova, Los Angeles, and at sea. The fifth is a recording of people interacting with a Satellite Sounder. All the pieces clearly demonstrate the differences in satellite activity and availability at different locations. Harris’s motivation here is not the scientific sonification of data, indeed she describes the results as musical compositions. Harris is seeking to explore “the relationship between the embodied experience of location and the calculated data of position” (http://yolandeharris.net/?nk_work=sun-run-sun-satellite-sounders). The result is a very engaging aural experience that clearly has a strong and direct relationship to the data.
Spoken text recorded in different acoustic spaces.
Two examples of shipbuilding, the first with hammering on a wooden hull in a small room, the second on a steel hull in a large space. Both examples are played back with approximately the same sound intensity level but differ considerably in the perceived volume of the sound.
Examples of convolution: (a) original vocal sound; (b) impulse response (breaking a balloon) in the cathedral of San Bartolomeo, Busetto, Italy; (c) vocal sound convolved with the impulse response; (d) vocal sound autoconvolved with itself; (e) autoconvolved vocal sound convolved with impulse response.
Piazza in Cembra, Italy, recorded by the World Soundscape Project, with three components to the auditory scene (foreground events, church bell in the distance, and the choir in a nearby church heard from the outside in the middle ground).
Entering an indoor swimming pool whose acoustics create a diffuse sound field.
An information rich outdoor soundscape recorded on Granville Island, Vancouver, by the World Soundscape Project, with narrative commentary by the author.
Excerpt of Barry Truax’s soundscape composition, Chalice Well (2009), which creates an imaginary soundscape of an underground cavern with water streams. Webpage: www.sfu.ca/~truax/chalice.html