Noise Intercepted Challenge #6 – The Eavesdropper
This week use your listening prowess to tap into the bits and pieces of fleeting information, conversations, and auditory activity happening around you. Pay particular attention to the sounds you hear stuck in transit, waiting in line, or passing by strangers on the streets. Create a response to this hyper-aware listening experience. What did you discover? What sound or idea or thought struck you the most?
I have done tests in the past that proved to me that we also hear with our eyes. Walking around blindfolded you become aware of your eyes trying to focus in on the sounds and gather more descriptors as to what it is and it’s exact source. When you couple this with both the source and the observer in motion an array of effects happen to hinder a sound’s understanding and location and, in the case of words, meaning.
In this piece there are 47 samples containing dialogue, which also include sound from the environment in which they where recorded. The average sample is around 6 seconds long. In recombining/reconstructing this material I wanted to manipulate some of the positional cues that help us locate sound. I did this by exploiting “boosted bands”. These are particular frequency ranges that we always sense coming from a certain direction. Of course there is also movement in the sound, by the source, myself, or both, which create a Doppler effect. In this piece (as far as I can tell) the languages are; German, Turkish, French, Polish, English, and Spanish. What’s interesting is that while this piece is a construction, it does not feel like it. I was not attempting to create a naturalistic recording by I guess hearing fragmented sounds and conversation is a normal experience of daily life.
Alan Gleeson 