Field-Sonifier
This project is part of the RISD x Hyundai Collaborative Research: Sound Design For Mobility.
To expand the role of designing around sound and mobility, I framed the following guiding questions:
- How might we increase a traveller’s awareness of their journey through sound?
- Since sound is an integral part of an environment, and mobility involves crossing localities, how might one augment the process of field recording in transit?
The proposed idea is to playback to people in transit recordings of the surrounding soundscapes using the spatial audio capacity in modern automobiles. This brings various nearby points in space (eg sounds of a nearby waterfall) and time (eg sounds of the past) closer to the travelers. This could reframe the sonically isolated experience of a car ride (conventionally designed to be sonic “cocoons”) by bringing the surroundings back into one’s sphere of awareness.
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From the idea of ubiquitous soundscapes followed the question: who gets to record those? To democratise and decentralize the curation of the soundscapes, I propose making field recording accessible to artists, scientists, historians, futurists, locals, tourists, among other actors.
To facilitate this activity, we need a field-recording device that is accessible, multifunctional and hackable.
The Field-Sonifier is a prototype of an augmented field recording device. It is uniquely design to allow for recording beyond what is heard; in hopes of capturing
the context comprehensively in the format of sound.
The hardware in the Field-sonifier turns elements from the natural and built environment ( light, weather conditions, electromagnetic waves; radio, A/C electricity) into sounds. Short demo below. This sonic translation of otherwise silent forces is half-art and half-science. It augments field-recordings by embedding data unique to the circumstances, in a aesthetically coherent way. Different users can decide to add other sensors or sonify inputs in whatever way they find appropriate.
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The hardware in the Field-sonifier turns elements from the natural and built environment ( light, weather conditions, electromagnetic waves; radio, A/C electricity) into sounds. Short demo below. This sonic translation of otherwise silent forces is half-art and half-science. It augments field-recordings by embedding data unique to the circumstances, in a aesthetically coherent way. Different users can decide to add other sensors or sonify inputs in whatever way they find appropriate.
A Bela board was used for audio programming. Antenna, temperature sensor, light sensor, mic in all feed into the board for processing, blending into a real-time responsive soundscape.
On the practice of field-recording:
Here’s a link to a
compilation of field recordings we’ve made in the Sound Design for Mobility group at RISD. Mixed for headphone listening. (Recordings by Qihang Li, Majed Bou Ghanem, Zack Davey, and Kate Reed, in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, March - May 2020 during COVID-19 pandemic.)
Most museums have physical artefacts that engage us visually, can a car be an auditory museum on wheels?
Who are the content creators?
The government? Ministry of tourism? The local community? is it crowdsourced like Google Maps? Is it scientists, artists, historians, business owners?
The current capacities of networks and storage devices give citizens superpowers in many ways, making it so easy for the average person to capture, document and archive our sonic surroundings and play them back. Sensing technology is also accessible, and can provide opportunities to involve typically unheard sounds into field recordings; expanding how we perceive and think of the world around us.
