An icon on the balustrade instructs participants to adopt a contemplative position - one must lay ones elbows onto the balustrade, cover ones ears, and look at the Old Town. While in this position, they hear the sounds of bombers and explosions, which travel through their arms directly into their inner ears via bone conduction.

People who attempted to block out the noise during the bombing are memorialized by Touched Echo. By striking the very same pose — blocking ones ears — visitors to the installation hear rather than obscure the terrible sounds.

Does hearing via bone conduction produce a more empathic response? Or is it the element of surprise, the lack of audio queues — speakers, headphones, amplifiers — that proves powerful?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHLobipEwBI

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.

Next week, the UB Art Gallery, in Buffalo, NY, will unveil two new installations by Repetto which “revel in madcap interactivity and DIY technologies.” The first, action at a distance (2008) picks up and runs with Repetto’s knack for making the ramshackle poetic. With materials that include “a bewitching tangle of motors and pulleys, zigzags of rope, an otter theater, jangling bells, fireflies, switches, breath activators, and rough steel,” the pieces ensnare visitors as actors — or perhaps reverse, wireless marionettes — their gestures triggering amplified sounds and the movements of the ropes and motors. everything, all at once (2008) is similarly immersive, with hundreds of mirrors, motors, bells, and lights pulsing in response to the enveloped visitor. Repetto’s work is a great example of how masters of the classical arts of music composition and sculpture are using new media to push their work into an interactive realm. - Marisa Olson, Rhizome.

The majority of cinema as a form seeks to: 1. capture ideas and impressions of the spaces and places we inhabit or 2. visualise those we can’t. The former of these, representation, has been more dominant throughout cinema’s history. The lens has in effect become a means of capturing our ‘reality’, allowing us to store and later reproduce sights and sounds to be replayed as a substitute for personal memories.

With the arrival of computing and it’s now widespread use within cinema we see the latter begin to take dominance. Cinema as representation is changing to cinema as simulation, creating an era more important than the transition from silent to sound or from black and white to colour. Cinema has the possibility to become a form without any necessarily inferred referent, it is known, quantifiable (pixels) and so can be modified, abstracted, constructed in numerous ways. It’s method of production can be improved, changed or even reconceived allowing it’s authors to work as never before. Cinema arrives at the end of an era with promise of a new one enabling it to become immersive, live, participative, interactive, navigable, recombinatory, distributed, networked, coded etc.

Cinema presents performances and screenings on this theme. Works will address the future of cinema and explore a diverse set of possible directions. The line-up for the evening will be as follows:

- Semiconductor (http://www.semiconductorfilms.com)
- Paul Adams (http://www.myspace.com/mrpauladams)
- Mick Grierson (http://www.mickgrierson.co.uk
- Frédérique Santune (http://www.saturne-feerique.net/LABO/
- John Kannenberg (http://www.stasisfield.com)
- Adam Chapman (http://www.adamchapmanart.com)
- 33dB (http://www.myspace.com/letageramegot)
- And more

Open Ear, audio-visual events and performances 2007 – 2008 are supported by Canterbury Christ Church University. For all further information, up to date details on events as they happen and videos of previous events please see the Open Ear website.

Canterbury Christ Church Broadstairs Campus, situated on the east coast of Kent, England approximately 30 minutes from Canterbury, opened in 2000 with a wide selection of higher education courses. The campus is committed to the arts and cultural regeneration of the area and regularly host’s events, exhibitions and performances on site. Detailed information on how to get here can be found on the university website.

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.

Valve / Membrance - Naoyuki Arashi (jp), Keisuke Oki (jp), Minoru Sato (jp) :: January 31, 2008; 9 pm :: House of World Cultures, Auditorium Nominee for the transmediale Award 2008 - Valve / Membrance is a series of electronic and non-electronic music pieces with traditional Japanese and Chinese valve instruments. The music bridges historical and regional differences of technological and musical forms. It focuses on cultural and technological elements from ancient Asia, the industrial revolution and the electronic age.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e30xL1yiqoI

hystere - Satoshi Shiraishi (jp), Alo Allik (ee), Yota Morimoto (jp), ibitsu (pp/ee) :: February 3, 2008; 8 pm :: House of World Cultures, Auditorium - hystere is an experiment in improvisation within premeditated boundaries in which the ‘e-Clambone’, a custom-made electronic wind instrument, provides the sole source for the ensuing multimodal environment. The visual aspect seeks moments of convergence and divergence with live video feed from the performance and is implemented as a library of OpenGL classes that listen to Open Sound Control messages over the ethernet.

10,000 Peacock Feathers in Foaming Acid - Evelina Domnitch (by), Dmitry Gelfand (us), Andrey Smirnov (ru) :: January 30, 2008; 10:00 pm :: Zeiss-Planetarium, Prenzlauer Allee 80 - The performance 10,000 Peacock Feathers in Foaming Acid visualises the fascinating surface structures of soap bubbles by using laser light. Dmitry Gelfand and his partner Evelina Domnitch create sensual immersive environments that bring together physics, chemistry and computer technology. The audio part of the performance is contributed by Andrey Smirnov, the director of the Theremin-Center in Moscow.

d.v.d. - Itoken (jp), Jimanica (jp), Takashi Yamaguchi (jp) :: January 29, 2008; 9:00 pm :: House of World Cultures, Cafe Global - The drums duo Itoken and Jimanica together with visual artist Yamaguchi Takashi are presenting their ‘interactive live installation’. With their drumsets the musicians are controlling game-like animations which are generating additional sounds. In turn their drum-play is dependent on the structure of the animation. The show at transmediale.08 is the kick-off event for d.v.d’s first europe tour.

DIGIT - Julien Maire (fr/de) :: January 31 and February 2, 2008; 1:00 pm :: House of World Cultures, Cafe Global - DIGIT is a living work of art – a writer sits at a table writing a text. The printed text appears through the mere gliding of his finger across a blank sheet of paper. Spectators can come very close to the writer and follow the emerging text. DIGIT is located between cinematographic process and the process of writing, while also making reference to the surrealist tradition of cutting and rearranging texts. His work DIGIT received an Honorary Mention in Ars Electronica 2007.

The Poème électronique was an unique experience, originating from the request made by Philips to Le Corbusier to design the company pavilion at the Brussels 1958 World Fair. The whole project was initiated and directed by Le Corbusier, who also selected the images for the audiovisual show. Together with this visual show, there was the organized sound, composed by Edgar Varèse. The stunning surfaces of the building were designed by Iannis Xenakis.

The result was the very first multimedia project to create a complete sound and vision experience using a totally immersive environment. Unfortunately, this visionary synthesis was ahead of its time: the Pavilion, the incredible number of visitors (2 million) notwithstanding, was demolished a few months after its inauguration, at the end of the Exposition.

The Virtual Electronic Poem (VEP) project, co-funded by the European Union through the Culture 2000 programme, realized a virtual reality (VR) environment capable of reproducing the global experience of the Poème électronique through a philologically accurate reconstruction of the original installation and a technologically innovative VR implementation.

Immersion is a free-entry experimental music / sound-art event featuring a soundtrack of electronic atmospheres, noisescapes, pulses / rhythms and tones / drones. Immersion is an arena for new and established international artists performing live experimental electronic music; using laptops, synthesizers, field recordings, circuit-bent electronics and prepared/processed instruments. All sounds are partnered by stimulating projected visuals processed live and tailored for each performance.

Alex Mein Smith: AMS has been described as “Rhythm n Drone”. Combining lethargic textures with heavy beats, the result is experimental yet accessible. All drums are analogue - all textures are guitar. Having released an album, AMS has had a year off…. this is his first show in many months.

Con Brio is pure electronica - a sound that glitches through heavenly glances of beauty then yanks you back to reality with cut-up beats dirty enough to make a hammer bleed. Direct to the brain quality melodies laced with clever beats.

Gabriel Da Piaz: Sounds and noises are organically produced from the guitar using various objects to ‘prepare’ the instrument, and create immersive soundscapes.

grohs is a sound manipulist - taking basic building blocks of sound and warping them into wild structures. Fragments of moments become swathes of sounds stretching into the distance. Whilst his recorded works tend toward the ambient end of the spectrum, his live shows can range from glistening soundscapes to full on noisefear. grohs is a co-founder of doombience duo Regolith, and prefers to describe his work as sound not music.

SS_R: Presents a series of sound experiments created by building upon non-programmed minimal repetitions of static noise and rhythmic feedback - processed through multiple filters and defined by accidental and reactive parameter interactions.

Suero is not looking for an electronic-perfect-label to describe what it does. Suero does not use computers. Suero builds a real time sound-noise sculpture based on his own sounds, to drive the listener to an analogue extreme and dark field, rather than a “cliche electronic happiness”.

Visual credits:

pixelpusher (Evan.Raskob) is a live video performance artist, or “pixelist”. After a few years of pixel-pushing across New York City, he now plies his trade on the mean streets of London. pixelpusher generates video out of a controlled chaos of photographic images, simple shapes, animations, sounds, and live video feeds. All software is homemade, all imagery is created live; things may go wrong in beautiful ways, and no performance is ever the same. www.lowfrequency.org

Transphormetic & yesyesnono: Oli Laurelle & Paul Prudence are real-time visual performers working with generative systems and processed video to create graphic sound-responsive works. They work separately under the names of yesyesnono and Transphormetic, as well as jam together for a unique brand of abstract experimental visual hedonism.

During a Bavarian snowfall in December 2006 I was amazed at the complexity of the hushed sound events that were occurring. The density of the sound field was impressive, but the three-dimensional, vector-like sense of the hundreds of thousands of infinitesimally small sound trajectories was truly astonishing. The mono recording I made could not capture the dense field of sound but it could capture its frequency content.

White Noise is the equal probability of all sound frequencies occurring at equal amplitude, but this was a permeation of downward motions, an immersive, cascading White Sound both figuratively and literally. Analysis of the snowfall sounds identified primary frequencies, much like an aural DNA of the event. Using digital filters I freed those primary frequencies, amplified them and then created a multi-channel sound field. The installation hopefully expresses a passion for perception, as it comments on the interpretation of perceptual data via the snow sounds we hear. We all know the sound of snow falling. Embedded in this sound are richly evocative, intuitively-enabled springs to meaning and association. Here they are the plastic art material of White Sound Down.