Short Project Description

Sounds of Qualia aims to involve people in the re-experiencing of space and through the space re-enacting the way they perceive themselves as present and active in it. The point is to engage people with feeling oneself in an unorthodox and spirited way. To give them a possibility to experience the world like they used to when they were children, when everything was 'estranged' and playful, before they learned how they should perceive things. It is an attempt to create the space that will provide an environment for this kind of engagement, to create the space for contemplation, meditation and exploration. This is achieved through creating a sound-sensitive space. Space enclosing elements, walls and floor, behave like microphones collecting sounds that are omitted. These surfaces consist of cardboard and interaction with them is heard in real-time through loudspeakers placed in strategic areas. Each interaction with a surface and which determines a border will produce a sound. This effect is achieved through the attachment of contact microphones to the cardboard and then by amplifying their range. This amplification is made possible by then connecting the microphones to a mixing board. From the mixing board, the sound signal is sent via the sound card to the computer where the sound is further processed by software. The hardware aspect of the project then consists of contact microphones, mixing board, sound card, a computer and a series of loudspeakers. Participants are introduced to several modes of potential interaction, which they then are able to choose from when entering the space. They select a specific mode for this purpose. They will be able to choose a different mode while being in the space. These modes are 'objective' as they use physical characteristics of a sound, like sound intensity, velocity, reflection, dissipation, etc., but their combination then determines the subjective resultant experience. Sound is processed in a Pd (Pure Data) patch, which is an open source graphical programming language. The first mode plays with the estrangement of spatial perception. In this mode sound is processed in such a way that signals from 20 sound-sensitive surfaces are mixed into a stereo-mix. This stereo mix is then sent to the computer running Pd as two almost identical stereo-mixes of the signals, one stereo-mix with added reverberation, and one 'clean' stereo-mix, without reverberation. The first part of the Pd patch is essentially a cross-fading noise-gate. It measures the signal level of the clean mix and, as this level rises, it decreases the volume of the reverberation mix while simultaneously increasing the volume of the clean mix. In the absence of the signal from the clean mix, this cross-fader will cross-fade back to the reverberation mix. The second and third modes play with the estrangement of the distance that sound has to travel between listener and sound source. This is done by the increasing or decreasing of the buffer size in which the sound is recorded before manipulation. The second part of the Pd patch consists of a stereo-pair of quadruple-tap delays, with the output of the four taps mapped quadraphonically into the four loudspeaker-pairs in the room and their delay-times being continuously modulated in a 'circular' fashion (i.e. using sine and cosine waves to control the delay-times). This creates a rotating Doppler effect. By varying the speed and depth of the delay-time modulation, a wide range of different effects can be achieved; from a slightly disorienting sensation that the walls are moving, via a wide range of speed-up, slowed-down and/or reversed echoes to sounds reminiscent of ping-pong, record-scratching or water droplets falling. The fourth mode is a variation of the previous two with the addition of a random function without preset options and allowing the participant to choose resulting in an unknown effect and, hence, an unknown experience. In the project, and in terms of Russian formalists, the "device" would be a 'sound' and the "technique" is the 'electronic space'. 'Electronic space' is a physical space augmented by hardware and software, or the specific programming language. Programming languages have their own internal rules according to which they perform a certain action. Flexibility they offer is that a designer can intertwine the set of rules he established for his project with the existing rules of the specific programming language. But in order to choose the adequate software or programming language he will apply, a designer needs to familiarize himself with the characteristics and a performance capacity of the language he wants to use. In the Sounds of Qualia Pd is chosen because of its ability for real-time sound processing. Also, for its graphical presentation of the structures performing an action that allows the designer better intro into what is happening in the patch. It is an open source language and is available for free use. It has a large community of users one can correspond with for an advice.

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