2012
“and when there was nothing left we had to create something,
we made words out of water so they could flow between us,
we waited for a boat to come,
hoping these seas we made would not dry out”
The sound of the world becomes the music in this new cinematic experience. The audience are invited to walk and live in streets they know, custom electronics pick up the noise of the city around them and remix it into the soundtrack, harmonising and synchronising the world so it merges with elements of a pre-composed score, the roar of a passing bus becomes a resonant tone that duets with a violin, the conversation of passers by is cut up into a pulsing rhythm. Satellite positioning lets the listeners journey shape the soundtrack and narrative, while bluetooth beacons placed in shops and cafes trigger recordings of their inner monologues, so the audience feels as if they are able to hear fragments of these peoples thoughts.
Credits
For this project circumstance was represented by Sarah Anderson, Tim Redfern and Duncan Speakman
Script and project conception : Duncan Speakman
Soundtrack : Sarah Anderson and Duncan Speakman
Platform development audio hardware : Tim Redfern
Voices: Jolijn Antonissen, Tiemen Van Haver, Katrien Vande Perre, Luth Lea Roose, Nathalie Allard, Kevin Trappeniers, Michiel Soete, Ken Verdoot, Cin Windey, Lore Uyttendaele, Grietkin Deroo, Lisbeth Jaspers.
Production assistance, script development : Elisa Demarré
Thanks: Kurt Van Houtte, Eva De Groote, Evi Swinnen, Suzanne Hendrikse, Georgios Patsis (ETRO AV Lab, VUB).
Presented with Vooruit as part of Electrified III:The Responsive City Created in collaboration with timelab and iMinds (Art&D) In the framework of Transdigital supported by the European Fund for Regional Development
Headphones provided by Urban Ears
Respect your elders
In 2006 Duncan made a performance work called ‘sounds from above the ground’, which involved a guided tour of a city where the audience hear a live remix of the surrounding ambient sound. Although very much a live performance it was heavily influenced by the amazing ‘Sonic Interface’ by Akitsugu Maebayashi. We moved onto working with Gumstix as a mobile audio platform after being introduced to them by Zack Settel and Mike Wozniewski while they were working on their 3D audio space systems in Banff. And of course we couldn’t forget to mention the wonderful RjDj which has made this sort of stuff accessible and distributable through iOS (and also made a stack of super useful audio processing tools)