interactive ambisonic sound installation, as part of the "Milch & Honig Festival"
together with Philipp Rockel
speaker array, camera, 2008
ambient intervention brings the subtle soundscapes of natural environments into urban space.
distant insects, trees and a creek generate a faint sonic landscape that is easily overheard by people accustomed to an urban environment. In this project I tried to accurately recreate this soundscape inside a building using an ambisonic audio system (ambisonics is a set of technologies that can provide the listener a good directional perception of sound within a certain area). The ambient recordings were done with a custom built microphone in a forrest, then played back through a speaker array inside the entrance hall of HS Augsburg. Volume was set very low to match the original approximately, thus the sound is mostly overheard by the casual listener, but can suddenly become very prominent when a loud cow or a rustling is triggered by the movements of people passing the hall. To detect these movements, the room is monitored with a webcam.
software:
the Computer Music Toolkit (CMT)
puredata
TetraProc, AmbDec from http://www.kokkinizita.net/linuxaudio
ardour