Post 3
- andrewramseymusic
- Jun 4, 2022
- 12 min read
Updated: Jul 23, 2022
Headphone Testing/ AR thinking
To have the idea of an altered reality sound walk work to its fullest potential, or the idea of an installation where the listener can simultaneously wear headphones and listen to loud speakers at the same time to exploit spatialization even more I would need the Headphones to be as transparent as possible, while still delivering good quality audio. I initially jumped to two possible options open-back headphones and bone conduction biker headphones. Although I could have the live feed from the mics coming through any pair of headphones this reduces the natural spatialization of the world down to what the microphones can pickup which would go against my initial idea.
Sadly I do not have a pair of either biker headphones and it seems the ones I can order in my price range might take to long to arrive for the scope of this project. But luckily I have a couple of friends who have open-back headphones that allowed me to borrow them for testing purposes, and they worked exactly how I would hope. Granted they aren’t perfect they still muffle the full spectrum cutting out some highs, but they allow you to have a good sense of your surroundings and their natural spatialization, much better than pair of closed backs.
The next thing on my to test list is microphone setup, initially I intended for their to be two omni mics attached to the headphones to attempt to pick up a makeshift binaural recording in order to recreate the surroundings as accurately as possible in order to produce a realistic modification. However this led me down the path of accessibility. If I am to follow through with this idea of an AR sound walk I would want it to be accessible and high quality to as many people as possible without having to require things such as open-back headphones and a pair of omni microphones. So throughout the next week I plan to perform a lot of tests with a demo of the patch to see how accessible I would be able to make the end project.
Impractical musical instruments
A project by Yann Seznec that is “about uncomfortable questions… musical devices that don't work the way they should… memory and remembering and listening and forgetting… acceptance.” https://www.impracticaldevices.com/
Seznec creates 3 unique musical instruments that look at the temporal and spatial aspects of sound in relation to our perception of them within memory.
Volume 1: A day that will never happen again
This experiment is memory with field recording is powerful and makes one reflect on what it means to capture the sounds of an entire day. Does that allow us to remember the day? Do these sounds represent the day in our memory that we have stored. Do these sounds allow us to lie and revisit this day when we want. To me these recordings are not that day, however they are from that day. They are a record of your child asking for food but they aren’t your child. What did that moment mean? Maybe that is more accurately what these recordings are capturing?
Although these sounds are recorded, like the moment they are from they are gone. That is what can give us a sense of longing or a reminiscent approach to such things but do they need to? Can we appreciate listening back or thinking of memories without being stuck in the past. As Seznec points out this day could be any other. This day could have been the day before or the day after but it wasn’t but when listening back in 20 years will we know the differance? Or does it just remind of the passing and changing of time? Something we all must face in life and is it better to walk with it than to hide from it?
Random thoughts had while reading through this project. But I think the way Seznec ends his thinking is similar to the approach that I have. These reflections on the past make me appreciate the present and future more. When listening to the sounds of yesterday surrounded by the visuals feelings and sounds of today, do they enhance each other as Chion states with sound and screen or do they subtract.
Quotes:
“It took me a few hours to decide to record the sounds of the whole day, so the project was really flawed from the start. I didn’t record the sound of my feet touching the floor for the first time, or the dog’s collar jingling as he shook himself out, or the sound of a little voice asking for breakfast in a mish mash of languages – “manger peanut butter, papa?”.”
“Those sounds passed, unrecorded, unsaved, moving air molecules in an ever expanding sphere until those movements faded away.”
“I’ve recently found myself accepting and taking comfort in the fact that every sound will only live once; travelling, reflecting, dissipating, and becoming absorbed again.”
“I’ve recorded those sounds now, so have they disappeared?”
“So now I can remember that moment.” ???
“What a powerful illusion this is.”
“Am I recording the sound itself, or a reference to the memory of that sound? Is all sound recording just a form of shorthand for revisiting a moment?”
“It’s about remembering and reliving that day in the same way that my memory does – as a fractured set of half-forgotten moments, sliced up and rearranged, sequenced and filtered and reorganised each time I go back to it. I can’t revisit that day, it will never happen again. My attempt to capture it with my sound recorder and my mobile phone camera was successful in the sense that I can reference those recordings and images”
“I can listen in perfect stereo and in real time, reliving an uneventful trip on the bus or an extremely windy beach. As I listen I know that I was there, holding the microphones with cold hands (was I wearing gloves? I didn’t take a picture of my hands, so how would I remember?)”
“I can always go back there, I’ve recorded it.”
“Each time I try and revisit this day, this normal, perfect day, it is jumbled and reconstituted for me. It won’t happen again, but there is joy in this. I can explore and play with my memories of the day, to see what is revealed and what is remembered.”
“an abstract representation of a day that could be any other day, because every day is full of life and fear and sadness and anger and wind and sunshine and showers and love.”
Volume 2: Here You Are, You Are Here
This experiment exploits sounds other element space. Sounds are produced in a location and are bound to it. And by eliminating the element of time, as Seznec does he allows himself to experience these sounds in a cut up and spaced out way, a way which he describes as being similar to how he processes memories in a non linear motion. It allows him to become hyper aware of his location as he moves through time simultaneously while moving through location, something that is doesn’t extremely well through the idea of sound walks however he adds the ability to pause the experience through the stopping of movement and therefore the stopping of time.
This emphasis on locations relationship to sounds and memory remind me of the Soundmarks that define a location based on cultural perception rather it is the sound of cicadas or the train that used to pass behind your parents house at 2am , or the waterfall on your favorite trail, or the soothing sounds of the ocean your favorite place to escape, or the quiet hum of an engine as the ambiences of the city your from pass by on your late night drives. Sound can transport you to a specific place, and then through this realization make you appreciate the places around you more.
Quotes:
“But I can’t seem to remember things in terms of time. I can’t recall a moment and live through it again, instead I might consider that a trip to the post office took forever, or that my nieces grew up so fast, or my train journey takes 65 minutes if all goes well. These memories are formed from a set of fragments which are reassembled and cross-referenced with knowledge that I can reasonably assume to be true.”
“Sound, on the other hand, is the perfect illustration of time.”
“When you listen to a recording you are accepting the illusion of re-experiencing and re-living a particular piece of time.” - and less so a manipulated environment
“Listening to something places a demand on our time, but in return you are in the studio with John Coltrane or on the moon with Neil Armstrong or in your living room as your child plays the piano. It’s happening again and you can listen to it and inhabit it at the same rate at which it first happened and perhaps in some way it means that you are there.”
“listening to a recording is an out-of-body experience – it breaks our relationship with our memory. We can listen to a sound again and again, each time forging connections between a vast set of individual moments and feelings and assumptions that swirl like a sandstorm in our minds, the granulated particles from a boulder of lived experience. Twelve years.”
“The inherently time-based nature of sound is removed, but the potential freedom this offers is problematic and functions only to ease my mind, giving me some temporary and illusory solace about the role of time in my life.”
“This is an instrument that forces me to explore my memory not through the medium of time, which has been shattered and fragmented digitally in the same way as it has been mentally, but through space.”
“And the sound doesn’t change. I’m stuck in a place in the sound, and I have to travel to hear it. I have to travel to do most things. I have to travel to my studio to build these instruments, I have to take a train to go teach to help pay for child care costs, I fly to see my family or play a show or go to a funeral or start a new job. Life, work, death, family; the spectre hovering over all of these things is the necessity for travel.”
“As I travel I am moving through the sound and moving through my memory, free from the confusing burden of time. The grains scatter around me, I leave them behind as I walk down the road or sit on the bus. I become hyper aware of where I am and where I have been for the last twelve years. On a street corner where my wife took me out for dinner on my birthday eight years ago I hear the tail of a piano chord, transformed into a rich ambience built from a cluster of overlapping 20 millisecond sounds, with slight randomness because memories are never built from a single moment.”
Volume 3: Everything you love will one day be taken from you
This project is a nice demonstration of the idea that everything is fleeting, through sound which is without a doubt fleeting. Leaving as soon as it enters. Even through recording we capture this fleeting sound in order to save and outsource our memories, but Senzec makes a great point, when are the sounds we recorded going to take so long to listen to that they absorb our current lives. So instead Seznec embraces this idea with his self destructive sampler. And although this is a great demonstration of letting thins pass, I think through the process of audio recording you slowly come to terms with the passing of time and audio. Even in a beautifully recorded moment, your memory of that moment passes over time leaving you with a vague connection. It is important to realize even through recording these moments are gone and these recordings only represent the shell, perhaps carrying with it a small portion of meaning but one that will never amount to the real thing.
Quotes:
“Sound is inherently transient, it passes through us and moves beyond us and is gone. In many ways sound is the form of media that is most illustrative of time, as we can only listen to a sound in the time it takes to hear it – we can glance quickly at a painting or scrub through a video but we can not speed up a sound without changing it fundamentally.”
“We need to give in to this, because the sound will pass, it will create a burst of energy that will expand in a glorious set of vibrations which will fade nearly as quickly as they began. So whilst sound is perhaps not inherently auto-destructive like paintings, it is fleeting. All things are fleeting, of course.”
“Sunshine, within the context of British culture, is something that needs to be caught before it can flee and disappear from our lives forever.”
“Capturing sound, or indeed any form of media, is its own special exercise in futility. We are collectively capturing and storing enormous amounts of sound, video, and photographs, trying to make records of everything we possibly can. The nature of sound makes this particularly problematic, as it is virtually impossible to listen back to everything that I have recorded – it simply takes too much time. I have made far more sound recordings than I could possibly listen back to. I’ve fallen into something of a sound trap.”
“And yet what of all the moments that were not photographed? What about all of the sounds I didn’t record? Are they not worthy of an emotional bond? Perhaps it is so hard to destroy what we have saved because we feel that they are saving us from something.”
“Making recordings, taking photographs, recording videos – these things satisfy my brain, providing me with the opportunity to outsource my memories to a phone, a computer, a hard drive, or the ‘cloud’ (or all four). When I outsource my memories I can relax, I don’t need to worry that life is moving faster than I can perceive it, that perhaps I have not fully appreciated the last dog walk or sandwich or hug.”
“How can I change my approach to listening to recorded sound, how can I force myself to reckon with the idea that the sounds that were made have actually disappeared, that the moment in which that energy was created has passed, that time has moved forward and I will not have that experience ever again?”
“Can I still remember the moment when I recorded this sound? How many times have I listened to it now?”
“I pointed a microphone at a moment once, I was there and I captured it, but by the time the sound had hit the microphones the moment had already passed, and in order to fully understand it I need to know that it is gone.”
Kaffe Mathews sonic bikes
The sonic artist and music maker Kaffe Mathews is part of a project called sonic bikes.
These bikes through various different projects are usually equipped with a various number of speakers and use the riders gps location to modify the sound in real time. Through this the listener also loses the confinement of headphones and the project brings focus onto the spatial aspect of sound. Instead of purely focusing on the sounds of a space they modify a large number of different content depending on the space while allowing it to speak along side the predetermined area of geography.
This project is slightly in a different territory than what I am thinking of but is related enough to push me farther in my thinking of exploiting sounds temporal and spatial nature.
Drone music’s relation to field recordings?
While listening to lots of examples of field recordings which I plan to make a blogpost over in the future just full of musical examples I found certain drone and electroacoustic music to demonstrate similar idea that are conveyed by albums containing nothing but field recordings and am curious of the connection. Specifically the works of Elaine Radigue, and Pauline Oliveros. I will need to make a more elaborate connection between these topics in the future but I thought it is worth while to bring up the conversation now.
Field Recording Works:
El Tren Fantasma by Chris Watson
Round Stone by Lewis Gilbert
Eliane Radigue – L'Île Re-Sonante
Big Mother is watching you by Pauline Oliveros
Game Engines
I have a great interest in exploring these ideas in a game engine even though there are apparent issues within this. Taking away the live aspect of sound will hurt the project potentially, and recreating such a vibrant and realistic soundscape of walking down a simple street in almost impossible. You will always need to pick and choose what ambiences you want played etc. However, in terms of accessibility, if the project is made using a game engine it would be extremely accessible. Yet because of the difficulty in pay off I have been thinking of abandoning the idea of a game based example.
Then I stumbled across the trailer for the upcoming game Season to be released on PlayStation and pc. https://www.play-season.com/ In this game the player gets to roam a world and explore through field recordings, photography, and sketching before the change of the season. When watching the trailer I remembered just how much a game can display through ideas and simple mechanics. So I started thinking again how can I make this project work in a game engine.
If I were to make a game it would be less focused on mechanics and more focused on creating an immersive experience that showcases these ideas and properties of sound. So I started to conduct research on various walking simulators. However, a lot of these I can tell already rely on story to move them a long where my game would contain no real story.
My current idea would be an immersive walking simulator where the player gets to choose between a couple of options of where they can walk, the seaside, a city street, etc. at night and while walking they experience and listen back to audio flashbacks from different days or times of day of that same location. These recordings would all be done by me of real locations in Edinburgh, such as Portobello beach etc. Although I would love for the player to be able to incorporate sounds from their everyday life I haven’t been able to wrap my head around the best way to do that in a game engine. This idea would practically simulate the live augmented reality version, hopefully creating a relaxing and immersive game that allows the player to reflect on time and space through audio.
I was hoping to find good quality 3d scans of the city for a simple effective backdrop but was unsuccessful in my search and although learned how to drop in 3d scans from google maps etc. learned the inherent issues with such plans and the copyrighted nature of all googles 3d scans making them practically unusable to my knowledge. However I plan to continue to explore these ideas within a game engine.
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