Deepening presence: probing the hidden artefacts of everyday soundscapes

Abstract

Sound penetrates our outdoor spaces. Much of it we ignore amidst our fast passage from place to place, its qualities may be too quiet or fleeting to pay heed to above the bustle of our own thoughts, or we may experience the sounds as an annoyance. Manoeuvring our listening to be excited by its features is not so easy. This paper presents new artistic research that probes the hidden artefacts of everyday soundscapes - the sounds and details which we ignore or fail to engage - and draws them into a new audible reality. The work focuses on the affordances of spatial information in a novel combination of art and technology: site-specific composition and the ways of listening established by Schaeffer and his successors are combined with the technology of beam-forming from high resolution (Eigenmike) Ambisonics recordings, Ambisonics sound-field synthesis and the deployment of a new prototype loudspeaker. Underlying the artistic and scientific research is the hypothesis that spatially distributed information offers new opportunities to explore, isolate and musically develop features of interest, and that composition should address the same degree of spatiality as the real landscape. The work is part of the 'Reconfiguring the Landscape' project investigating how 3-D electroacoustic composition and sound-art can incite a new awareness of outdoor sound environments.