skip to main content
10.1145/3411109.3411120acmotherconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesamConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Deepening presence: probing the hidden artefacts of everyday soundscapes

Published: 16 September 2020 Publication History

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.

References

[1]
P. Schaeffer, "Traité des objets musicaux (Treatise on Musical Objects)," Oakland, California, University of California Press, 1966 / 2017, pp. 69--111.
[2]
M. Chion, "Audio-Vision: sound on screen," New York, Columbia University Press, 1994, pp. 25--34.
[3]
T. Ingold, "The perception of the environment: essays on livelihood, dwelling and skill," London, Routledge, 2002, pp. 153--243.
[4]
M. R. Schafer, The Tuning of the World, Toronto and New York: McClelland & Steward and Knopf, 1977.
[5]
G. Cerwén, "Listening to Japanese Gardens: An Autoethnographic Study on the Soundscape Action Design Tool," International journal of environmental research and public health, vol. 16, no. 23, p. 4648, 2019.
[6]
A. Valle, V. Lombardo and M. Schirosa, "A graph-based system for the dynamic generation of soundscapes," in 15th International Conference on Auditory Display, Copenhagen, 2009.
[7]
S. Berge and N. Barrett, "A new method for B-format to binaural transcoding," in Audio Engineering Society Conference: 40th International Conference: Spatial Audio: Sense the Sound of Space, Tokyo, 2010.
[8]
N. Barrett, "Audio Mostly sound examples," 2020. [Online]. Available [Accessed July 2020].
[9]
L. Ferrari, Composer, Presque rien No. 1 'Le Lever du jour au bord de la mer'. [Sound Recording]. INA-GRM MUSIDISC 245172 -- 1995. 1970.
[10]
M. Raimbault, "Qualitative Judgements of Urban Soundscapes: Questionning Questionnaires and Semantic Scales," Acta Acustica united with Acustica, vol. 92, no. 6, pp. 929--937, 2006.
[11]
N. Barrett, Composer, He slowly fell, and transformed into the terrain. [Sound Recording]. Due for release Winter 2020. 2016.
[12]
P. Coleman, P. Jackson and J. Francombe, "Audio Object Separation Using Microphone Array Beamforming," Audio Engineering Society Convention 138, 2015.
[13]
S. Markovich, S. Gannot and I. Cohen, "Multichannel eigenspace beamforming in a reverberant noisy environment with multiple interfering speech signals," IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, vol. 17, no. 6, pp. 1071--1086, 2009.
[14]
J. M. Valin, F. Michaud and J. Rouat, "Robust 3D localization and tracking of sound sources using beamforming and particle filtering," IEEE International Conference on Acoustics Speech and Signal Processing Proceedings, vol. 4, pp. IV-IV, 2006.
[15]
A. Fahim, P. Samarasinghe and T. Abhayapala, "PSD estimation and source separation in a noisy reverberant environment using a spherical microphone array," IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, vol. 26, no. 9, pp. 1594--1607, 2018.
[16]
"Spat5 Max library," IRCAM, [Online]. Available: https://forum.ircam.fr/projects/detail/spat/. [Accessed 15 May 2020].
[17]
L. McCormack and A. Politis, "SPARTA & COMPASS: Real-time implementations of linear and parametric spatial audio reproduction and processing methods," in Audio Engineering Society Conference: 2019 AES International Conference on Immersive and Interactive Audio., York, 2019.
[18]
F. Wendt, G. Sharma, M. Frank, F. Zotter and R. Hoeldrich, "Perception of spatial sound phenomena created by the icosahedral loudspeaker," Computer Music Journal, vol. 41, no. 1, pp. 76--88, 2017.
[19]
V. Drack, F. Zotter and N. Barrett, "A personal, 3D printable compact spherical loudspeaker array," in Audio Engineering Society 148th Convention, Vienna, 2020 May 25 -- 28.
[20]
N. Barrett, "Reconfiguring the Landscape YouTube links," 2020. [Online]. Available: https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/821232/821233. [Accessed May 2020].
[21]
M. Gräf, "Quadrature Rules on Manifolds," [Online]. Available: https://homepage.univie.ac.at/manuel.graef/quadrature.php. [Accessed 14 July 2020].

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Other conferences
AM '20: Proceedings of the 15th International Audio Mostly Conference
September 2020
281 pages
ISBN:9781450375634
DOI:10.1145/3411109
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 16 September 2020

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. acoustic ecology
  2. acoustics
  3. composition
  4. feature extraction
  5. higher-order ambisonics
  6. loudspeaker technology
  7. sonification
  8. soundscapes

Qualifiers

  • Research-article

Funding Sources

  • Norwegian Artistic Research Program

Conference

AM'20
AM'20: Audio Mostly 2020
September 15 - 17, 2020
Graz, Austria

Acceptance Rates

AM '20 Paper Acceptance Rate 29 of 47 submissions, 62%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 177 of 275 submissions, 64%

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • 0
    Total Citations
  • 90
    Total Downloads
  • Downloads (Last 12 months)17
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0
Reflects downloads up to 20 Feb 2025

Other Metrics

Citations

View Options

Login options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Figures

Tables

Media

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media