PRESENTATION TO VOLUMETRIC SOCIETY [excerpts] =================================================== Presented to Volumetric Society at Harvstworks on October 17th, 2012. Details of SuperCollider presented by David Reeder. Details of Wappen Field project presented by Michelle Jaffe -- sculptor, designer, director and producer of Wappen Field. #---------------------------------------------------- -o- WAPPEN FUNDAMENTALS Wappen Field is a sculpture and sound installation comprised of twelve chrome plated steel helmets resembling face guards. A dedicated speaker in each helmet transforms the sculptural installation into an immersive audio environment. The voice samples, culled from a team of diverse and unique vocal performers under the direction of Ayelet Rose Gottlieb, are algorithmically reconstructed in a second, disjunctive round of composition by David and myself using SuperCollider. The sonic configuration imagines the collective unconscious as energy propelled between yin and yang impulses of the universe. By wedding sculpture with sound, I intend to create a participatory experience where each element forges a sum greater than their individual parts. This work explores the installation as a space of visceral possibility igniting memory and the subjective experience of those who engage the work. I am interested in pre-cognitive states of mind, reaching deep into collective memory, while referencing design, fashion, cultural cues and our current social and political space. The Wappen Field installation effectively combines sound with sculpture, creating a venture greater than the sum of their individual parts. #---------------------------------------------------- -o- WHAT IS THE SOUND OF WAPPEN FIELD? We've seen that Wappen constitutes a field of helmets that also represent an array of monitors. The raw sound material consists of human voices singing, breathing, screaming, talking, and other things. Therefore, the pieces of Wappen Field are concerned with manipulating and spatializing an encyclopedia of samples. The larger work is divided into a series of songs and episodes, of which you will hear excerpts. Total runtime is roughly 15 minutes, utilizing all 12 channels. I should also mention in passing what we won't talk about tonight -- the code behind Wappen Field also represents a number of other functions, including tools for granular synthesis, and subsystems for routing, timing and message passing. But for now, back to the encyclopedia of voice samples... SuperCollider provides a means to do this in a reasonably straightforward manner. The word "voice" is a bit overloaded, however -- first, we refer to the recorded voices, and second, we use voice as a jargon in electronic music to indicate a unified field of sound generated by digital synthesis or sample playback. So we have voices of people recorded in the studio, versus logical, computationally composed voices. Going forward I talk mostly about the latter type of voice, where any one instance of a voice might be a combination of any number of sounds from any of the original recordings. In addition, SuperCollider allows each moment be personalized in a manner I describe as bounded chaos. For example a voice could be made up of a gesture found in a sample, or it could be constructed by scrubbing the sample in a pattern likely to pull the salient characteristics from that section of the sample. In the first case, gesture, the exact timing of the onset can be tempered with randomness, allowing it to sound slightly different against its backdrop each time it occurs. In the case of scrubbing, usually there is a simple function -- for example two scrubs forward of 1/4 to 3/4 second paired with one scrub backwards less than 1/2 second -- where each duration and each placement of the playhead can be slightly randomized. Thus the sounding of this voice will always have the same character, but may sound, or say something, different each time it plays. This can lead to some very interesting and revealing effects when many voices, generated by bounded chaos, are sounding together. It is possible to realistically imitate the sound of a milling crowd, or garner a sense of sadness or euphoria that we normally associate with spontaneous, unrepeatable, ephemeral life experiences. Voices have a sound, but they also move from speaker to speaker (or helmet to helmet). Twelve speakers makes for a graph, just large enough that coherent movement requires making decisions about placement and trajectories. We think about the movement of voices as choreography. In the general case, these decisions are made by applying a finite state machine to the function that chooses the output channel. Overall, the goal is to make the result sound as natural and organic as possible, even though the sounds we hear never existed in the real world. Though we are deriving from real recordings, we aim to build an artificial world that surreptitously approaches real experience and replaces it in the fantasy projected by the installation. Here's another excerpt that illustrates a solo voice, multiplied amongst a chorus of whispers. Simultaneously, I'll display excerpts of SuperCollider code that generated this sound. We'll discuss the code afterwards if we're not too short on time. #---------------------------------------------------- -o- SUMMARY AND CLOSING COMMENTS The Wappen Field sculpture provides an archetypal, iconic experience that is readable across many axes, providing a crucible for subjective projections. The helmets evoke armor, which protects and hides us in an attempt to create a border between self and Other. Information and objects are obstructed. Physical and psychic space is guarded, unless the edge is pierced, allowing foreign bodies and ideas to flood in. The boundary of armor asks the question: what is shut in, what is shut out? The sound environment intends to complement and extend the visual and spatial experience by approximating the means by which we communicate directly with one another.