{poz, 191215}
The two questions by Hanns Holger and David somehow resonated (ahah :/ ) together and stimulated the quick experiment that you can listen here. Especially what David noted, that the acoustic properties of a space are inscribed (more or less indefinitely, I would say) in the space itself, made me want to try to simulate a room that escapes this rule. It's essentially a room whose dimensions slowly shrink or expand according to the different resonances that are excited over time. I basically divided the spectrum in 16 zones, and the energy of each zone affects the lenght of one of the 16 delay lines (== changes the room dimension).
What I like here is the temporality of the process, and how it moves from one state to another but still maintaing a sort of coherence to itself.
I'm also wondering whether some aspects of this experiment could be transposed to the actual space we will work in. Obviously the wall of the staircase won't expand or shrink, but maybe would be interesing to think of a process that, while exploring / exciting the different resonances of the space, at the same time modifies / disguise its acoustic properties. If possible at all.
One thing I would like to try is to couple this sc space to the staircase itself. Now the sc room is put in self oscillation by a single impulse at the beginning, but what would happen when opening it to the outside (microphone and loudspeakers as we planned)? I am quite intrigued by the idea of having these two rooms, one whose properties are inscribed and one that is constatly changing.
{function: response, keywords: [architecture, room, space, reverberation, FDN]}
The role of reverberation; its causality versus an inner reverberation (radiation, vibration) of things, movement, people. Is it a volume, a form, accidental, reflection or complement? Does that become part of the piece?
{kind: quote, persons: HHR}
Memory is not some object stored somewhere. It is a process of writing and rewriting continuously into and onto.
It the process extends towards big (from a human perspective) time scales, then we are taking about resonances.
{kind: quote, persons: DP}
These resonances are memory of the geometrical and all material properties of the space, of who uses the space and how, of the architect's plans, if its function etc. To say that these resonances "contain" these "information" would be reductive: they emerge from a continuous interaction of the space with the entities passing through it but also, and mostly, by a process of self-interaction and feedback.
{kind: quote, persons: DP}
With resonances I refer to the resonant frequencies of the space. Given its material textures, its structure, its dimensions, specific resonance have been inscribed into the space, resonances which produce specific frequencies will be clearly perceivable when the space is excited. Also, these are frequencies towards which sounds in the space would in some sense "fall into" (some sort of attractors).
{kind: quote, persons: DP}
Is it viable to just exchange some channels of sound? It does not have to be the same sound the works are projecting into the space: maybe some intermediate stage of the sound synthesis?
{kind: quote, persons: DP}
Can (a) bridge(s) be included in your segmentation networks? If so, do they have a direction? :are they(is the one) supposed to be one directional, two, or more? If there are more than one bridge, do they look identical or not? Can they have a function as to make the whole network extended? Do they have the same characters or different from each other? Would they be recognizable, e.g. having a certain duration and standing as a segment?
{kind: quote, persons: JYK}
{poz, 191215}
I think these two questions are also somehow related, and it's something I often encounter in my practice. How to think a bridge, a relation between two parts? Where is the boundary between the two and when are they rather components of the same thing? In the systems I write, these boundaries are often only conceptual and derived from my personal view of the system itself. At the same time, they deeply influence the way I think of the system and how I work with it.
In a way, our boundaries here are easier to identify. We will have four parallel processes, and some bridge, exchange or relation inbetween them. Regarding the nature of these bridges, my personal preference would go in the direction of what David proposed here - exchanging channels of sound. The reason behind my choice here is that I think there is quite a difference between exchanging something already existing inside one's own process (exchanging some intermediate stage of the synthesis, exchanging a part of the process) and creating a protocol on top of it that somehow abstracts some information (hey, I'm playing). I like the idea of having the possibility to embed part of your process into mine and viceversa.
since the idea of exchanging channels of sound could not be viable (we originally talked about OSC communication as a less complicated alternative) I shall think about what exchanging a part of the process would mean in a protocol that doesn't allow a 1:1 representation of that part
{function: response, keywords: [relationships, bridges, communication, protocol]}
---
meta: true
author: POZ
artwork: ThroughSegments
project: AlgorithmicSegments
keywords: [questions, responses, proposal, brainstorming]
---
With Rhythms I refer to recurring, self similar sonic pattern, as for example, the steps of someone going up or down the stairs, or the closing of doors producing a short sequence impulses with different energies. But also patterns that emerge on bigger time scales, like the activity patterns between day and night, across weeks and weekends etc.
The installation process picks those patterns up and integrates them into its own evolution. In a process of continuous synchronization, reaction and interaction with the space and the its inhabitants, the installation would lock into those patterns mimicking, but also slightly bending them.
Interaction with those patters, slightly changing them, bending them into a different pattern, recomposing them, should happen through acoustic interaction. How strong this bending or re-composition could be is probably determined by how effective the patterns produced by the algorithm are in interacting with the space's patterns.
Which are the regions of effective interaction? How to find them?
{kind: quote, persons: DP}
People pass through the stairs, either going up or down, or sometimes standing still. Do you see any different influences of their movements especially on the segmentations within your musical outcome? In other words, can (a) segmentation(s) become a flexible or an organic entity by their interactions?
{kind: quote, persons: JYK}
If thinking about sound as gestalt; can we distiguish foreground/background, and how would they relate to your sonic intervention (through speakers) within an existing sound (the sound that is already there in the space)? What then constitutes foreground/background, and are these statically assigned positions?
{kind: quote, persons: HHR}
{poz, 191216}
I think our choice of including microphones in the work is already a movement towards the inclusion of the "background" in the "foreground". Obviously the microphone signal can be interpreted in many different ways but I can imagine that, to a certain degree, people passing through the stairs, doors closing etc. will affect each segment. I think, this doesn't necessarily makes a segment organic or flexible, but it could be interesting to try to achieve a kind of "organic interplay" between foreground and background, with transition where the border between the two is not distinguishable or statically assigned. A possible model could be that of synchronisation, but I agree that here the fundamental question is how to find the regions of effective interaction. Somehow I find it easier to think the relation background->foreground (the influence of the environment over the segmentation). The opposite way, how the installation could affect the space, is a bit less clear to me at the moment - by affecting here I mean changing some prooperties of the space (to "occupy" the space is not "affecting"). So this probably relates to my previous question about if and how to influence or camouflage the acoustic properties of the space.
{function: response, keywords: [foreground, background, interaction, microphone, interplay]}