On June 19, 20 and 21, Edwin van der Heide presented his “LSP”, a performance where image and sound play equally important roles. Sound / video combinations often reduce the spatial perception of sound because of the two-dimensional nature of the image. The performance “LSP” used audio controlled lasers to create a three-dimensional environment that totally immerses the audience and allows for a constant change of perspective. Image and sound originate from the same real-time computer generated sine wave composition. “LSP” represents a system of direct equivalence of image and sound, where frequency ratios in sound, de-tuning and phase shifts have their direct visual counterparts.

In 1815 Nathaniel Bowditch described a way to produce visual patterns by using a sine wave for the horizontal movement of a point and another sine wave for the vertical movement of that point. The shape of the patterns depends on the frequency and phase relationship of the sine waves. The patterns are known as Lissajous figures, or Bowditch curves.

“LSP” interprets Bowditch’s work as a possible starting point to develop relationships between sound and image. Since sine waves can also be used to produce pure (audible) tones, it is possible to construct a direct relationship between sound and image. Frequency ratios in sound, de-tuning and phase shifts can have a direct visual counterpart.

Although theoretically all sounds can be seen as sums of multiple sine waves, music in general is often too complex to result in interesting visual patterns. The research of “LSP” focuses on the subject of composing signals that have both a structural musical quality and a time-based structural visual quality. Different relationships between sound and image are used throughout both the performance and the installation form.

Edwin van der Heide studied Sonology at the Royal Conservatory, where he graduated in 1992. He is working as autonomous artist in the field of sound, space and interaction. His current work is hard to define in the traditional terms of music, sound art or media art because he is often working on the edge and the characteristics of the used medium. Over the years the focus of his work has shifted to sound installations, interactive installations and environments. The performance aspect is still present in part of the work but the emphasis has shifted to the content of the environment and less focus on the performer.

Adam Nash will lead a tour of his work on Thursday, May 22, 2008 between 6:00 p.m. and 10:00 p.m. US EDT. If you would like to take part in the tour, please contact adam at yamanakanash dot net.

Trace Aureity is a 2007 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., for Networked Music Review. It was made possible with funding from the New York State Music Fund, established by the New York State Attorney General at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.

BIOGRAPHY

Adam Nash is a new media artist, composer, programmer, performer and writer. He works primarily in networked real-time 3D spaces, exploring them as live audiovisual performance spaces. His sound/composition and performance background strongly informs his approach to creating works for virtual environments, embracing sound, time and the user as elements equal in importance to vision. Adam’s work has been presented in galleries, festivals and online in Australia, Europe, Asia and the Americas, including SIGGRAPH, ISEA, and the Venice Biennale. He also works as composer and sound artist with “Company in Space” (AU) and “Igloo” (UK), exploring the integration of motion capture into real-time 3D audiovisual spaces. He is currently undertaking a Master of Arts by Research at the “Centre for Animation and Interactive Media” at RMIT University, Melbourne, researching multi-user 3D cyberspace as a live performance medium; and he’s a Lecturer in “Computer Games and Digital Art” in the School of Creative Media at RMIT University. Read an interview here.

Browsing the Synapse Database — which is searchable by “Individuals”, “Interests”, “Projects / Events / Publications,” “Organizations” and “Gallery” — I came across Nigel Helyer’s Sonic Landscapes R + D project:

From June 1999 until September 2001, Helyer worked as an Artist in Residence at Lake Technology in Sydney, developing the Sonic Landscapes Virtual Audio Reality system … The salient feature of the Sonic Landscapes project is the juxtaposition of a fictive (but very convincing) 3D immersive sound-scape, accurately positioned by cartographic software, upon a physical terrain. The effect is somewhat akin to Murray Schafer’s concept of ‘Schitzophonia’, where, by the simple act of recording, sound is split from its original physical context and projected into another context.

However within a Sonic Landscapes experience we are not simply dealing with the disembodied voices of popular music reproduced and re-contextualised via a stereo-sytem! Here we are engaging with a seemingly live sonic organism that is responsive to our presence, our orientation and the traces of our wanderings, and which appears un-cannily embedded in the site itself.

The prototype Sonic Landscapes Unit is capable of operating with a 2cm positional accuracy when employing differential GPS (Global Satellite Positioning) and with a one degree accuracy for rotational head orientation, which, when combined with Lake’’s headphones delivered virtual speaker array, provides a highly realistic immersive audio environment. Tracking technology for the Sonic Landscapes project has been provided throughout by the SNAP Lab of the University of New South Wales under the guidance of Professor Chris Rizos. Future collaborative projects are currently underway between the Artist and UNSW c.f. “Audio Nomad”.The choice of a prototype test site for the project was St Stephens graveyard in Newtown; one of Sydney’s oldest burial grounds, which provided an ideal pedestrian environment, rich in historical material and interesting physical structures.

Flou (pronounced “flew”) is not exactly a game; you do fly a ship through space, but you cannot shoot anything, score points, or win or lose. The focus, rather, is on the soundtrack: as you navigate through a 3D world and zoom through objects in space, you add loops and apply effects to an ever-evolving musical mix. You can also design your own worlds to fly through and share them with other Flou users.

Flou is a 2007 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. for Networked_Music_Review. It was made possible with funding from the New York State Music Fund, established by the New York State Attorney General at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.

BIOGRAPHIES

Jason Freeman uses new technology and unconventional notation to break down barriers between composers, performers, and listeners, creating music that “stands as an example of the Web’s mind-expanding possibilities” (Billboard) and helps to “bring composition into the Xbox age” (Wired). Recent projects include “Flock”, a full-evening performance for saxophone quartet, dancers, and audience participation commissioned by Carnival Center for the Performing Arts in Miami; Graph Theory, a solo violin and web-based work commissioned by Turbulence; “iTunes Signature Maker”, a software artwork commissioned by Rhizome; and “Glimmer”, an audience-participation piece commissioned by the American Composers Orchestra. Freeman received his B.A. in music from Yale University and his M.A. and D.M.A. in composition from Columbia University. He is currently an assistant professor at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, where he teaches in the Music Department in the College of Architecture. [Read an interview with Jason]

The students in Freeman’s Networked Music course at Georgia Tech (Andrew Beck, Xiang Cao, Mark Godfrey, Jagadeeswaran Jayaprakash, Al Matthews, Rachel Ponder, Alex Rae, and Sriram Viswanathan) are currently pursuing M.S. degrees in music technology, digital media, and human-computer interaction, and they have diverse backgrounds as composers and performers of experimental and popular music, as computer scientists, and as engineers. Over the course of the fall 2007 semester, they collaborated to develop the concept for Flou, to design its user interface, visual components, and sound worlds, and to write, test, and deploy the software. They are currently creating a live-performance version of the work for presentation in spring 2008.

For January, {R}ake stays close to its roots. We’ve paired-up musicians and video-artists who haven’t formally collaborated together to present a night of truly improvisational multimedia performances. Josh Ott brings his realtime 3D video-drawings to play against Charles Cohen’s and Hair Loss’ noisy analog electronics; Audrey Chen brings a her cello / vocals-based electro-acoustic music to play against Richard Garet’s sometimes ambient, sometimes electrically-charged video; and the estimable DJ Olive brings his prototypical vino-electronics to play against the often - interactive / often - something - new video of Dan Winckler.

{R}ake is a performance series of alternative and collaborative electro-acoustic music and video. Performances range from pure improvisation to more structured pieces, with video-artists and musicians working together in exploratory ways.

Monkey Town serves dinner during the show, so come hungry.

Three circles of loudspeakers are suspended from the ceiling above an abstract landscape. On entering the space, the visitor starts the composition with a button at the center of the piece, triggering an immersive audio-visual experience in a 3-dimensional soundscape, enhanced by a specially designed LED lighting system. For the exhibition in Berlin, Keiichiro Shibuya creates a new composition which is presented here as a world premiere. It is based on research of complex systems and makes use of cellular automata and logistic maps for sound synthesis.

The accompanying CD filmachine phonics emulates the spatial experience of the installation within the limited acoustic space of stereo headphones.

Opening: January 28, 2008, 7:00 pm :: Podewils Palace, Klosterstr. 68, Berlin (U2: Klosterstrasse / Bus 100: Alexanderplatz).

At the transmediale festival the artists will give a lecture about their work. Keiichiro Shibuya and Takashi Ikegami: The Third Term Music January 30, House of World Cultures.

Keiichiro Shibuya will perform live in an evening at club transmediale with alva noto, Alexander Rishaug and Marius Watz - Generator.x 2.0, February 1, 8 pm :: Ballhaus Naunynstr.

filmachine was developed and premiered at Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media in 2006. The international premiere in Berlin is produced by Les Jardins des Pilotes for transmediale.08. Co-produced by ATAK. Organised by Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media. Technical support by YCAM InterLab. In cooperation with Tokyo National University of Fine Arts & Music. Kindly sponsored by Musikelectronic Geithain, Audio-Studiotechnik Glasa and Color Kinetics Japan. Commissioned by the Agency for Cultural Affairs of Japan.

Natasha Barrett uses a recording technique following the acousmatic composition heritage. Here composing begins at the sound recording stage, improvising with less conventional recording techniques and capturing a spatial and spectral microphone ‘performance’. Often the result is one of placing the source under a sound-microscope. In Microclimates III-VI it is the complete environment of each location that is placed under a sound-microscope.

Most of the sound-sources are purely the environment acting naturally on itself and on the recording equipment. In a few instances some sounds were coaxed for the microphones - sounds that would happen naturally, but seldom, and never when you are ready. Small rock falls. Tearing moss and rotten wood. Popping leaf buds. The movements:

Microclimate III: Glacial Loop

On my first attempt to record sound at the foot of Briksdalsbreen glacier I arrived when the wind was so strong that it forced rain horizontally into my face and body. For brief milliseconds I could open my eyes to glimpse a blue ice monolith through the turmoil. Some days later, on my second attempt, the scene was completely different. Although grey and drizzling, there was not a breath of wind and the forms in the ice were revealed: an enormous wall of blue twists and gashes suspended vertically an unknown distance away across a lake. Instinctively I jumped into the small rowing boat and with ceremony descended two hydrophones (underwater microphones) into the water. Our guide rowed so close to the face of the glacier that as my microphones recorded its electrical sparking, sucking, squeaking, whistling, burning and clicking sounds, I could at the same time run my hands over the smooth curves of its close-up form. To this constant singing and talking was added a single underwater ice fall. Slowly and gracefully the boat glided away from the face. Glacial Loop is an evocation of this boat journey.

Microclimate IV: Wet Face

Wet Face takes sound from marsh birds, dripping water, squelching mud, tearing moss and rotten tree-wood in the Sandane area. Initially the forces appear gentle. Later, when I subject the microphones to what for our normal ears is a gentle pitter-patter, we hear the bombardment and force in a different light. The rhythmic performance of incessant dripping had begun when I arrived. Its millisecond timing was ‘computer’ perfect. I expect it will be the same year after year. Maybe the rhythm will change as the rock is eroded.

Microclimate V: Water Fall

For Water Fall I threw two hydrophones off a bridge into the white rapids of ‘Holvik fossen’ (Gloppen), while keeping four more microphones stationary to capture the air-born soundscape. Turbulence and eddies dragged the hydrophones through local current systems, tossed them suddenly into the air or further down stream, smacked them into opposite eddies or plunged them into imploding air cavities. After a while I learnt a little about the waterfall’s system and attempted to anticipate where the microphones would end up and what type of sound they would capture. This proved interesting play - in one moment I had steered the microphones, at another moment the waterfall had tricked my anticipation.

Microclimate VI: Remote gale

The timing of my trip meant that an excursion to Utvaer would not enable entrance into the main attraction of the lighthouse, nor to overnight on the island. Instead the idea was to overnight at Hardbakke - a westerly point of the mainland - and daytrip by boat to the island. When I arrived at the accommodation a full storm brewed in the distance. Later that evening I received an SMS from an old sailor friend reading “full storm, 40 knots south westerly. This is no weather for sailing in the open ocean. Stay on land”. The next morning a call came from the captain saying he needed more time to get hold of a “bigger boat”… The driving rain and wind had clearly not deterred him, so I used this extra time to waterproof my equipment. Out at sea my stomach continually leapt into my mouth. At Utaer the wind and rain drove horizontally (an experience I would once again have at the glacier). Even with a thick weather shield over my microphones I needed to find windbreaks. The wind sung around every rock, every corner, through every gap. It was so strong you could even hear the airborne wind sound on hydrophones in the sea. The island was scattered with small houses. At one end rose the lighthouse. Open porches offered some rest from the raw weather. The lighthouse’s locked door hid a tower of still air. The wind knocked me over and one stereo microphone became entangled in a thorny bush. I let the wind buffet both bush and microphone as one, recording continuously.

Natasha Barrett’s work spans the extremes of concert electroacoustic and acousmatic composition through to sound-art, large-scale installations and live performances. The focus of this work stems from an acousmatic approach to sound, the aural images it can evoke, and an interest in high quality or unusual recording techniques that reveal detail the ear will normally miss. Although she is freelance, she tries to sustain the research side of her work as she finds this adds important life to her artistic creations. The spatio-musical potential of acousmatic sound has been one of her research and creative interests over the past ten years.

Most of the time she calls herself a composer rather than a sound-artist. As a composer she creates large scale forms of intense musical structure that requires the listener to listen attentively throughout the duration of the work. These works are most suited to concert hall, home listening or radio. As a sound-artist she presents the audience with an open experience that allows their own choice of listening approach. These works are mainly in the form of installations (sometimes interactive), and they may also exist for home listening. Both types of work may contain similar sound and a similar approach to sound. The critical difference is the approach to structure, time and intended affect of the listener. You can find more of her work here.

Gridjam will utilize Jack Ox and David Britton’s Virtual Color Organ™, visualizing Alvin Curran’s music performed by musicians located in four distant locales but connected via next generation networking technologies. The Virtual Color Organ™ (VCO) is a 3D immersive environment in which music is visually realized in colored and image-textured shapes as it is heard. The visualization remains as a 3D graphical sculpture after the performance. The colors, images, shapes and even the motions and placement of the visualized musical shapes are governed by artist-defined metaphoric relationships, created by hand as aesthetic and symbolic qualities rather than algorithmically. The VCO visually illustrates the information contained in the music’s score, the composer’s instructions to the musicians, and the musicians contributions to the score as they improvise in reaction to each other’s performances and to the immersive visual experience. Illustrative of synesthesia and intermedia, the VCO displays the emergent properties within the meaning of music, both as information and as art.

Ox created the original drawings of deserts in California and Arizona from which the Desert Organ Stop was modeled, commissioned Richard Rodriguez to model the landscape, and created the hand drawn texture maps appearing in the virtual reality world. The VCO is capable of having multiple visual organ stops. An organ stop on a traditional organ is a voice that affects the entire keyboard of notes. An organ stop in the VCO is the 3D immersive environment in which the visualized music will exist and also the visual vocabulary applied to the musical objects.

The 21st C. Virtual Color Organ™: The VCO is a computational system for translating musical compositions into visual performance. This interactive instrument consists of three basic parts:

1. A set of systems or syntax that provides transformations from a musical vocabulary to a visual one.

2. A 3D visual environment that serves as a performance space and the visual vocabulary from which the 3D environment was modeled. This visual vocabulary consists of landscape and/or architectural images and provides the objects on which the syntax acts.

3. A software environment that serves as the engine of interaction for the first two parts.

The VCO is capable of having multiple visual organ stops. An organ stop on a traditional organ is a voice that affects the entire keyboard of notes. An organ stop in the VCO is the 3D immersive environment in which the visualized music will exist and also the visual vocabulary applied to the musical objects. GridJam will take place in the black and white, hand drawn desert sand and rock structures coming from real deserts in California and Arizona. The original drawings by Ox, from which the 3D modeling was made, serve as the basic texture maps for all of the musical object.

The Music: by Alvin Curran

Curran has come up with a plan for the musical part of this project which is inspired both by the pure fundamental “synesthetic” goals of Ox’s visual structures as by the technical and theatrical nature of the domed projection spaces, the local accoustics and “global” nature of the work itself.

The music itself will be composed using a fluid mix of structured indeterminacy, synchronized composition, spontaneous music structures, and live electronic processing. But the essence of the music - whose goal is - to become interchangeable with the images is to create another set of “images” real and sonic, which is the music-theater itself. The L-Rail communicatioins will enable the complete synchronization of the dislocated music groups and their ability to react as if in the same room together.

The choice of instruments, will become another prime visual element embedded in the rich texts of Jacks desert and VR sound-objects. The music shall be performed by the Del Sol string quartet, Anthony Braxton on the saxophone, and Curran on the disklavier (playing sounds which have been modeled in MAYA by Ox over the last four years. These sounds will be subjected to processing device filters (by Tom Erbe/Sound Hack), e.g. granulators. The 3D objects will go into perpetual movement patterns that metaphorically represent the filters’ processing patterns.

The music (gestures and typologies) itself will range from almost inaudible sparse noises to discreet isolated tones to pulsing synchronous rhythms to clouds and walls of sound. characterizing the music throughout will be the presence of recorded (natural) sounds from animals, people and machines and phenomena from around the world (which however embedded in the texture, are at the source of the visual materials generated)… Midi information from the processing devices will also serve as real-time transformers of some aspects of the visual objects.

GridJam: The Visualization

The original building blocks of GridJam come from a list of almost 200 collected sounds belonging to Curran. The sound files include John Cage reciting short phrases, Maria Calas singing a high note, animal sounds, objects like coins being tossed, and various musical sounds etc. Ox put them through a Max program creating graphs of melody and dynamics. She sorted them into 8 groups based on these simple visualizations and made 3D models reflecting melody from the front and dynamics on the top of the object. There are eight groups because there are eight landscape texture maps. Each object in a group has as the base of the texture map the same hand drawn landscape picture. The colors and materials are based on the timbre of each specific sound sample. These colors can be rather complicated gradients, often in layers. If the sound sample has a sequence of vowel sounds then the colors in the gradient will show these based on Ox’s color system, which defines how and where vowels are made in the vocal track. Other timbre colors come from the extensive list of timbre created by Ox.

The 3D objects made by Ox from Curran’s collected sound files will be able to appear in small bits of the whole, based on the duration of the played sound. If the Disklavier key remains depressed for longer than the actual sound file, the object will begin to appear for a second time, moving along the time line. The time line follows a path from the center of the virtual desert out, until it curves up and back towards the center. .Before reaching the center it will curve up again and move outward once more, repeating this pattern for as many times as necessary in order to accommodate the playing. Because of this path, time will move both horizontally and vertically.

At the end of the performance the visualization will remain and can be more thoroughly inspected as a place with moving objects in a black and white desert environment. We will also have recorded the entire multimedia experience so that it can be played back in digital environments, such as the ever more ubiquitous digital planetarium theaters.

Adam will be answering reader’s questions in the comments section below until January 31, 2008.

Helen Thorington: I understand that you do not think of yourself as a sound artist in Second Life. I wonder if you would explain why?

Adam Nash: I think of a realtime 3D multi-user environment (3D MUVEs), like Second Life, as a post-convergent medium. This means that no single media-element (sound, vision, sociality, network, time, etc) takes precedent, rather they all exist equally in a symbiotic relationship, without which none of them could exist.

[Image: Unsung Song #16: Blue Sound Ground]

Helen: Do you have any musical training? Do you play any musical instruments? Does this help or hinder your explorations?

Adam: I don’t have any formal musical training, but I do play a few instruments badly, chiefly the drums and keyboards. I have many years’ experience playing in bands and making music for soundtracks and performances. I also have quite a lot of experience as a live performer in performance art, dance and movement. Like all experience, it both helps and hinders my explorations in 3D MUVEs. While I am able to build and expand upon musical performance techniques, I assume that the same experience severely hampers my ability to see potential in a new environment. I really love music, but I think new environments like this reveal music as an outdated concept. I still think music is useful – indeed I release a lot of my own music under a Creative Commons license via my net-label at www.concentrated-sound.net – but anachronistic. I was first drawn to realtime 3D back in 1997, when I first encountered VRML, and it struck me as a very similar environment to the inside of my own head when I was creating music for performances. It is a spatial environment in which sounds can be animated in a way that is easy to visualize but impossible to achieve in the physical world. It is a logical next step to see the environment as the performance environment as well as the composition environment, and from there quickly grows the concepts that I explore in 3D MUVEs, basically audiovisual environments that users navigate within to create their own unique experience from the elements provided by me. It’s like the composer’s mind, the instruments and the venue all rolled into one.

Helen: Tell us about composing sound for Second Life. You have called it a “technically very limited and frustrating environment.” What are the limitations and frustrations? Are there redeeming features?

Adam: Composing sound for Second Life, or any 3D MUVE, is fun, because of this ability to provide the basic audiovisual elements and then leave the user to arrange (ie, navigate) the elements as they please. This is an extremely exciting and satisfying way of working, because it removes the need for arrangement – a skill, different from composition, that is absolutely crucial in linear music. There’s nothing wrong with arrangement (often in linear music it is the thing that turns something great), but often there are an unlimited number of potential ways of arranging a piece of music and the musician is forced to choose only one.

From: Infra_Assemblage

Also, with this idea of the melding of the composition environment and performance environment, the act of creating work is often enormously enjoyable because you get to fly around and through your ideas, trying out different ways of navigation that you may never have realized were possible when conceiving of the piece. It’s like a slightly more concrete iteration of the limitless imagination scape in which all these ideas are found.

The technical limitations of Second Life are significant and many. The main limitations, for me, are the lack of a proper modeling hierarchy, and a few things to do with sound, like the 10-second limit per file and lack of control over falloff. There is also an undocumented limit to the number of simultaneous sounds that can be played. On the other hand, there are a lot of positives about working within limitations, as the artist is forced to be creative and come up with novel solutions. It also means many formal decisions are made prior to starting work, which in some ways makes things easier. Like most things, it is both blessing and curse.

[Image: Unsung Song 2: Crescent]

Helen: Avatars play an important role in your work by activating the sound. And yet you have “core problems” with them. “The avatar concept”, you say in July’s empyre discussion “is the one I find the most troubling, and it also grows from the 3d-space-as-physical-simulation misassumption. There is no need to concentrate presence into one cohesive point (an avatar).” I wonder if you would explain what you mean by this, and perhaps suggest alternatives.

Adam: Well, if avatars play an important role in my work, it’s because they play a very important role in Second Life itself. The problems I refer to are both technical and conceptual. First, the analogy of a single point of presence, from which the rest of the world is perceived, and in which the rest of the world perceives you, arises directly from our physical world, where our sensory organs are coalesced in a single unit and cannot be separated. Recently, humans have been able to spread out perception and presence through technological mediation, for example cameras, telephones, radio and the internet, and I think we are certainly slowly moving away from the concept of a single point of perception and presence, but mostly it is still how we negotiate our physical existence.

But, it is a very underexamined concept in realtime 3D, and particularly in Second Life. This is true of the entire physical world analogy that controls the working concept of Second Life. Even though it may seem natural to use 3D space to recreate physical space, that is only one possibility, and certainly not the easiest, because it can never recreate physical space, only represent it. Once we move into the sphere of representation, different modes of perception are required (one never actually walks on a map).

Because the system to which our bodies are subject (ie, physical space) is now being represented, we need also to represent our bodies, not recreate them, otherwise things quickly get confusing and the representation becomes limited in usefulness. This happens as soon as we move our ‘camera’ away from our avatar – we are no longer seeing and hearing via our avatar’s eyes and ears, rather we are perceiving from whatever point in the 3D space that our ‘camera’ is at. Yet, within this synthetic space it is perfectly feasible that we could perceive from both the position of the camera and the position of our avatar. This is not difficult or unusual, in fact we are already doing it twice simply by having a default avatar in Second Life. The first, significantly, is the physical/virtual superposition, where my physical body is seeing and hearing my avatar see and hear – already I have two points of perception (literally and conceptually). Then there is the ‘over the shoulder’ point of view that SL avatars default to, behind and above the head of your own avatar, really a camera that is following your avatar. It is seeing and hearing your avatar see and hear. So now I am seeing and hearing my camera seeing and hearing my avatar seeing and hearing. I am simultaneously perceiving from three different points, literally and conceptually. I think this is one of the reasons so many people feel so disoriented when first encountering realtime 3D space.

Since it is possible, indeed common, to perceive from two or three points, then it’s a small step to expand the number of points of perception arbitrarily, both in space and in time (lag and multiple private chats are both examples of multiple points of perception in the temporal dimension that all SL users are comfortable with).

Practicing the agency of presence via multiple points perhaps seems a more subtle or difficult concept, but again SL users constantly deal with others via multiple points of presence. For example, most users quickly become comfortable with the idea that another user may not be seeing and hearing the scene from their avatar, or that they may be simultaneously dealing with the physical world and the synthetic world and the mediation device itself. Indeed, SL specifically acknowledges this via the device of having the avatar’s eyes and head follow the user’s mouse pointer when dealing with the user interface. This means that others’ avatars are, variously, a presence notifier (the person is logged in), a mouse, a representation, none of these things, all of these things and potentially many more things besides.

[Image: Unsung Song #9:Corona]

Helen: I can fly alone through your installations and activate sounds. I can get friends to move through them with me and produce different sounds. I can play with the work and it changes. Isn’t it in fact important for your work to have the avatars’ presence concentrated in one space?

Adam: In that sense, the avatar is serving the standard function of a mouse pointer for 3D space. Again, this is mainly because of the restrictive working analogy of Second Life itself, which enforces this role for the avatar, and it’s true that some of my works are a specific comment on, and working within, that restriction. But, it is not necessary for the user’s avatar to be concentrated in one space. Ideally, for many of the works, the user would be able to branch off avatars and move spatially through works in different ways simultaneously. Similarly for time. Or, to be able to interact with different works simultaneously in space and time.

Certainly, I consider all the pieces in, say, Seventeen Unsung Songs to be all parts and aspects of the same work, quite literally. Sonically, they are all constructed from the same rational scale that I devised, based on a fundamental tone of 77Hz then proceeding in intervals of ratios over 7. All of the pieces use this scale, and one of the pieces (Blue Sound Ground, which users pass through at the entrance) contains all of the sounds used in all the other pieces, both as a conceptual readying and also a technical device to load as many sounds into the user’s cache as possible. Visually, also, all the pieces are clearly very strongly related, sharing colours methods of distributing colour across hue, saturation and opacity spectra. It would be ideal if they could be experienced in multiple modes over space and time.

[Image: Anahata,The Mute Swan]

Helen: Have you considered what kind of work you might produce if in fact presence were not concentrated in one point? If presence were distributed over time, location, data and media?

Adam: I think it implies a more involved work, a work where the user experience becomes extremely important to the work. The extent of the user interaction over multiple points determines, to large extents, how the work develops and emerges. Works could take dynamic notions much further. For example, currently we can trigger a certain sound or animation based on sensed data about an avatar’s position and other metrics – this could be expanded to include many different aspects of the nature of the user’s engagement with the work. It suggests work that exists across environments, building on gameplay techniques to build a performative and experiential vocabulary cooperatively between artist and user. This is tremendously exciting and suggests a kind of work that could accompany users through time and space, growing and changing together. This kind of thing would start to approach the mechanics of true non-linear interactivity.

Helen: It seems to me that your work adds new parameters to sound/musical composition. In most of the networked musical pieces I’ve heard or seen described, this has not been true. Music remains music, separate or separable from other things, like the space in which it is played and its audience. And while I find this very difficult to talk about, what you introduce has to do with audience immersion and presence in the space; and audience activation of the work as a result. Thinking of the participant, I think of words like “experiential” (experiencing through the movement of my avatar-body as it explores the space you have created), the bringing into existence of music/sound. Thinking from the point of view of the music/sound, it’s not like filling a space with pre-determined sound (as so many of us have done in RL), but rather creating a dimensional space with potential… And that the two constitute a unique approach to creating and experiencing music.

I’m reminded of NOX Son-O-House, a public pavilion that is both an architectural and a sound installation that allows people to not just hear sound in a musical structure, but also to participate in the composition of the sound. It is an instrument, score and studio at the same time. A sound work, made by composer Edwin van der Heide, it is continuously generating new sound patterns activated by sensors picking up actual movements of visitors.

Is this similar to the work you’re doing?

Adam: Oh, well, I certainly hope so. I’m not familiar with that work, but it sounds very similar conceptually to the process I touched on earlier, where the compositional environment, the performative environment and the experiential environment converge, and the resulting symbiotic relationship reverberates back and forward throughout the previously distinct stages, merging them into a new, post-convergent environment of interactive, emergent, audiovisual experience.

Helen: Given the desire for multiple avatars to simultaneously/collectively activate your installations, how do you reconcile the absence of avatars or the single avatar interacting with the piece with your intentions?

Adam: I’m not sure I fully understand this question, but most of my pieces can be experienced at multiple levels in terms of number of avatars, length of time spent, familiarity with 3D space, etc. Again, this is related to my desire for an approach to the medium that is not tied to a physical world analogy of a single person with a single body. Even though SL is a multi-user space, it doesn’t preclude single users, and this is true of my work too, I hope. Some works are probably more satisfying aurally when used with other people (eg, Rarer Air), but other works are designed for individuals to interact with different elements of the SL experience, besides the social, in which case the number of avatars using it doesn’t really matter too much (eg, The Space Between). Yet others are unaffected by the number of avatars accessing them (eg, Appolinarium). I really try to explore many different aspects of the realtime 3D MUVE environment in all my different works, so its difficult to align all the work with an over-riding desire on my part.

From: Bell Garden

Helen: Have you created sound installations in other virtual worlds? If yes, can you talk about the similarities and differences, pros and cons?

Adam: Again, I really don’t think of them specifically as sound installations, but yes I have worked in many different virtual worlds/environments over the past 10 years or so, including VRML/X3D, ActiveWorlds, Blaxxun/Contact, Unreal, Torque, Quest 3D, Multiverse and even GEM in Pure Data. Differences are mainly technical, with VRML/X3D being by far the freest and most able to accommodate large scale, unrestricted concepts. In practice, it’s always had some problems dealing with lots and lots of simultaneous sounds, but I think that Niall Moody has solved that with his Helian browser, though I haven’t had a chance to use it – I’d like to but SL has got the mindshare at the moment, so that’s where curators want you to work. It’s a shame VRML/X3D never gained wide acceptance in the media arts community. As for the other environments I mentioned, they’re all commercial products to greater or lesser extents, except for Pure Data, so they all have significant technical restrictions that arise as a function of the commercial aims. Multiverse looks interesting in terms of extensibility and freedom, but again I haven’t had a real chance to properly check it out. I’m trying to at the moment with my colleague John McCormick, but again we’ve been commissioned to do a mixed reality piece using Second Life, so that takes up most of our time. Pure Data (known as pd) is the opposite, it’s open source and specifically designed for audio. With the GEM library in pd you can use OpenGL to create responsive 3D environments, and John and I have been working with that a little, with promising results. Most of these environments have things that they do better than others and things they do worse. SL does a lot of things poorly and a few things well, with its popularity being its chief advantage at the moment.

From: A Rose Heard at Dusk

Helen: You refer to your SL pieces as “audiovisual sculpture” and “site-specific installations.” Can you talk about the difference, and what makes Seventeen Unsung Songs site-specific, but not A Rose Heard at Dusk?

[Image: A Rose Heard at Dusk]

Adam: I guess “audiovisual sculpture” refers to all my work in 3D environments, whereas something like Seventeen Unsung Songs is a collection of inter-related audiovisual sculptures that were commissioned by Sugar Seville specifically for an island that already existed, therefore it is “site-specific”. It wouldn’t be possible to recreate Seventeen Unsung Songs in its entirety without having an island that was very similar to East of Odyssey, but it would of course be possible to install individual pieces from within that show in different places.

Helen: What do virtual worlds offer you as an artist that real world spaces don’t?

Adam: To me, this comes back to my concept of the post-convergent medium. The physics of realworld spaces make it impossible to attempt such things as continuous realtime dynamic animation of arbitrary numbers of sound and vision sources based on continuous realtime sensing of presence and other metrics. However, the comparison still considers the primary role of virtual spaces to be a recreation of physical space, which is not what I think. The kind of art that I have ever attempted in real world spaces has always been primarily performative and very different from virtual work. I guess there was a point of crossover when I was still working with The Men Who Knew Too Much and looking to combine real world and virtual art, but since 2002 any work I’ve done that involves so-called mixed reality has chiefly been in the service of others like Igloo, but then I tend to do the music/sound and some performance. I don’t see virtual spaces as a separate reality, I very much see virtual space as wholly contained within the real world.

Helen: We’re seeing more and more artists combining sound/music and moving images/video, referring to themselves as a/v artists and VJs. Why do you think this is?

Adam: I guess it’s a natural progression from a past that had discrete partitions between all sorts of experience, as a result of both technical and conceptual limitations. As media starts to converge, and access to both the means of production and means of distribution becomes easier, it becomes more viable technically to enact the kind of concepts that naturally emerge. In particular, two generations of music video and clubbing combine with more meme-like concepts of emergence and networks to create a desire to operate across a range of media. Most people’s media vocabulary is of a sufficient level of sophistication that practitioners are driven to explore new modes of expression to engage meaningfully with an audience.

Helen: Are there any other artists working in the same vein as you?

Adam: Plenty of really interesting artists operating in Second Life, many of whom share aspects of exploration and practice with each other, myself included. Some who come to mind are Gazira Babelli, Annabeth Robinson/AngryBeth Shortbread, Christopher Dodds/Mashup Islander, Bingo Onomatapoeia and the Avatar Orchestra Metaverse, DC Spensley/Dancoyote Antonelli, Brad Kligerman, Juria Yoshikawa, Keystone Bouchard, Daruma Picnic, Christine Webster/Wildo Hofmann and Andrew Burrell/Nonnatus Korhonen. That’s just a short list, there are lots of people doing lots of interesting work all over Second Life.

Helen: Who are some of the artists you most admire?

Adam: John Power, John McCormick, Burno Martelli and Ruth Gibson (Igloo), Bruce Mowson, Melinda Rackham, George Clinton, Prince, Greg Egan, Yoko Ono, Morton Feldman, Brian Eno, Mark Rothko, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. There are so many artists whose work I really appreciate, but those are the ones I genuinely admire.

Helen: Do you have predictions for sound art trends, developing technologies, the 3-D web? Have you any thoughts on what the future impact of immersion/presence might be? Do you think it might make “play” and “fun” more important to our lives.

Adam: I think we’re entering the post-convergent era, where distinctions between sound, vision and other media elements will cease to be meaningful. I definitely think play and fun will become more important as 3D environments grow in acceptance, alongside the growth of computer games as a medium. I certainly think that games, in the broadest sense, are the artistic medium of this century. Simulation and modeling will be of enormous importance to society and we will learn a lot from artists and practitioners of games and virtual worlds, and vice versa. The distinction between real world and virtual world will cease to be meaningful. We’ll see a convergence of networked experience via 3D, something like a 3D web but much deeper and more enjoyable than that phrase suggests. I definitely think we’ll see a move beyond the use of 3D space as just for representing physical spaces. The multiple points of perception and presence that we’ve already talked about will grow in acceptance and utility, along with an expectation that art will manipulate this.

Helen: Thank you, Adam, for this great interview.

Visit the following URLs for more information on Adam’s work:

seventeen unsung songs: http://yamanakanash.net/secondlife/unsung_songs.html
a rose heard at dusk: http://yamanakanash.net/secondlife/rose_heard_at_dusk.html
anemochord: http://yamanakanash.net/secondlife/anemochord.html
eudemonia stellata http://yamanakanash.net/secondlife/eudemonia_stellata.html
infra assemblage: http://yamanakanash.net/secondlife/infra_assemblage.html

For information on Adam’s other projects, go to: http://yamanakanash.net/projects.html

Videos of some of his works are available for viewing at: http://www.waystowave.com/adam/secondlife/movies/

Ms. Chung will channel each note from Bach’s “Goldberg Variations,” as performed in 1955 by Glenn Gould, into its own respective speaker – 56 in all – while the piece plays in its entirety. The speakers, spaced six feet apart, will play the piece in unison as the music wraps around the audience. Ms. Chung calls this experiment a “sound sculpture,” or the molding of music around a space. She envisions the notes as individual tangible elements, with substance and mass that can be arrayed into an energized sonic structure throughout the giant Legacy studio space.

The enormous performance hall at Legacy Studios will be enveloped in music as Ms. Chung conducts this momentous experiment in sound for her exhibit, Inside the 100 Foot Piano. The audience will sit surrounded by speakers while the music, as Ms. Chung describes it, “moves in the space, as if Glenn Gould’s fingers are dancing.” The arrangement will play as the series of notes winds around the audience – every trill, crescendo, and movement will be captured in a moving, living melody.

This experience will create a three-dimensional soundscape, one in which the music will dance – not just hang in the air. Ms. Chung’s exhibit will give physical life to music, allowing it to travel around the hall, moving in and around the audience.

An-Ting Chung has an ongoing collaboration on film, video, and sound works with the widely acclaimed Shen Wei Dance Arts Company, who have performed at the Lincoln Center Festival and the Kennedy Center, and who will be responsible for the choreography of the opening ceremonies at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. She was also the sound editor for Shen Wei’s choreography for the piece “Re-, part two,” which was performed by Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal in 2007. Ms. Chung has been creating sound exhibitions for the past 10 years beginning with her master’s degree thesis exhibition at Rhode Island School of Design in 1997. She also presented two exhibitions in New York in 2000 and 2007, both sponsored by the National Culture and Arts Foundation in Taiwan.