Projects
Projects
Audio Walks
Audio Walks offer a wonderful way to place detailed spatial sound installations in the wild. These walks in Boston and Chicago use layered and animated spatial sound in the Echoes.xyz platform.
Nature Walk is set in Boston Common and Public Garden. Enter or dwell at any point. It is in three sections:
The Great Elm Remembers
The Great Elm Remembers surrounds The Great Elm in Boston Common and is a meditation on deep memory — both public and private. The Great Elm is no longer standing, yet it endures in our public memory. And for many — those still living and those now passed — it holds personal memories, some of which are woven with its public history. These memories have a power to connect us across time — to a moment, a people, or perhaps a person. In cultures native to this place, the songs of birds are sometimes heard as messages from the spirit world. It seemed fitting to place virtual flocks on this now phantom tree. Inhabiting its absence are sonic populations of local birds. At the tree’s core, these birds resonate wind chime bells to aid their messaging. These in turn resonate down through its roots — and its still- remembering rhizosphere.
Gibbons in The Garden presents a tropical forest surrounding the Boston Public Garden Lagoon. There is a tradition at the Garden of planting tropical flora in the summer months. This stems from a Victorian era fascination with the Tropics. We extend that here with recordings of a 130 million year-old forest - among the oldest on earth - that I made in Sabah, Malaysia (Borneo) in the Fall of 2024. Several recordings are set around the Lagoon. A small group of gibbons have broken free to sing throughout the Garden along with a few of their Sumatran cousins. Near the entrance on Charles St, one of the forest soundscapes is mixed with tones derived from a mRNA sequence that is the focus of the next section.
Running between the above two biomes between Charles Street and The Great Elm is Ribosome Retune. The name is a play on the focus of this section - exploring Just Intonation on scaffolding of gene expression. This section of the walk dives into a smaller scale of nature, but in a way with significance for Boston. Musically, I was interested in spatial animation of harmonic tunings mirroring natural patterns and processes. I was drawn to Just Intonation (JI) for its clarity and richness of harmony that defies Western tuning’s (12-Tone Equal Temperament) 12-TET categorizations of consonance and dissonance. This unmooring from 12-TET categorical intervals is abundant in the finer details of intervalic combinations and their relation to functional harmony. This more nuanced psychological space is what I wanted to explore. But it’s a vast and chimeric domain. So I sought a natural architecture on which to structure this exploration. I chose gene expression for a couple of reasons. Our recent experience with the Covid-19 pandemic brought broad public awareness (and gratitude!) to the field of biochemistry in its rapid development of mRNA vaccines. Secondly, for this ICMC, it seemed a modest way to honor the enormous contributions to this field from across Boston’s great research institutions. Indeed, last year (2024), Victor Ambros at Massachusetts General Hospital and Gary Ruvkun at Harvard Medical School were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work on microRNA regulation of mRNA. But what is that? Might it offer a “natural scaffolding” on which to explore JI? This piece is that exploration - a personal adventure to learn about the fundamentals of gene expression voiced through spatial JI. It is an exploration, not an explication. That is, I wouldn’t claim today’s result is a salient “sonification” of RNA transcription and translation. But I’ve tried to represent the biochemical qualities and processes coherently, and - as for any musical work - hopefully in ways that offer worthy listening. This section uses the coded section of the LIN-14 gene (that used in Ambros and Ruvkun's work) to generate tones from its bases and spin out chords of their coded amino acids using the amino acids' molecular weight, polarity, and charge to affect their chords' tones, size, spread, and rotation. The short LIN4 miRNA sequence enters above the walk and moderately stifles amino acid chords in its proximity. More information on the mRNA to Just Intonation mappings is found in their zones: "Ribosome Retune - LIN-14 Coding Region (CDR) Nucleotides and Amino Acids" and "Ribosome Retune - LIN-14 5' Untranslated Region (HTR)".
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Flocks of Birds
I love birds and I love walking. I often bring a microphone on casual walks. You never know what special aural scene you might discover. On neighborhood walks in Evanston, Illinois, I especially enjoy hearing the vocalizations and interactions of birds. However, this is often interrupted by a loud truck passing by, or a lawn mower, or leaf blower. I wondered if I could record the birds and then recast individual vocalizations in a setting without intrusive machines, and also influence the interactions around the little dramas that play out between them. And with that, allow the free movement and proximity of the listener to make the listening experience more intimate and immersive.
One can approach this in many ways - with technologies large or small, from theatrical to personal. When we heard about Echoes, we thought it could be a wonderful way to achieve personal listening, but also ground the experience with place. Echoes’ geo-activated mobile apps, which support Ambisonic spatial audio, allow the immersive placement of aural theater in real locations for non-intrusive, personal listening. They deliver many public audio walks across a broad range of genre and location. .
So, back to birds. Where would be a natural setting to situate bird dramas? Honestly, I think birds are wonderful everywhere. But for a public location, would a great public garden work? The Lurie Garden with its central, downtown Chicago location and its cultivation of a native but diverse collection of plants, seemed a wonderful place to try this. The video below shows how we’ve mapped 23 bird flocks to the Garden.
Echoes Mobile App
The Echoes Mobile App is available in the App Store and Google Play. Many audio walks are available there by browsing titles, geographic area, or current proximity to the user.
Imaginary Flocks of Lurie Garden contains a network of seven pieces or "Echoes", laid over the Garden, each hosting all, but featuring specific bird species. These pieces are displayed geographically in Echoes, as seen in the next figure. Echoes also displays your current location and which zone you are currently in, if any. When in Autoplay, each zone's audio is activated when entering that zone. When not in Autoplay, you may also select zones from a list view as seen in the 2nd figure, regardless of whether you are geographically present or not.
Ambisonic Audio Implementation
This video shows the the 23 flocks of birds laid across the Lurie Garden. A green bounding box is optionally displayed around each flock. Each flock is of a specific species - Cardinal, Robin, Crow, Blackbird, Woodpecker, or Wren. Each has specific vocalizations, influenced by their individual nature and how they react to other birds in their vicinity. These reactions are defined by their species and the current attitude of the other birds they encounter. The "player" in this video shows the location and orientation of a virtual 1st Order Ambisonic "microphone", implemented by Resonance Audio in Unity. The result is intended to be both a natural sounding and musically interesting soundscape.
The color-coded base map is from Lurie Garden. All of the bird artwork is taken from Teresa Parod's Midwestern Birds mural
The birds in this walk, the recordings of their vocalizations, and the dramas of their interactions will evolve and improve over time, as does the flora of the Lurie Garden.