Running into difficulty mainly with choice of location for transducer, after trying the resonance of the speaker on various walls and stairs. The best source of resonance was on the floorboards of the hallway downstairs. If I attempted to use the speakers up the stairs where I had intended the piece to sit, it wouldn’t be as impactful due to the sub bass and speakers coming from the rooms upstairs. If it’s on the floor you can feel the vibrations. That reminds me of Pauline Oliveros’ in Deep Listening when she talks about having ears on your feet. I felt like there wouldn’t be a way to safely place one in the hallway where people would be walking but with technical assistance from Milo, we took apart the floorboards and screwed it to bottom of the floor.
I forgot to take pictures of the Monacor Bass Rocker as we screwed it to the underside of the floor board. We tacked the wires through a gap in the flooring.
Once we had that set up, I ran my sounds through in Mono to test the speaker. It sounded great on its own. The small speakers that I thought might add some ‘realistic’ high frequencies, were quiet in comparison to the Bass Rocker. The walking sounds I was set on, weren’t as ‘real’ as I had imagined. I put this down to resonance & reverb of the space, and after trying various EQ notches. Couldn’t eliminate this doubling of the space – which reminded me of Alvin Lucier’s I am Sitting In A Room. Maybe foley in an isolated studio, with a similar type of wood could have created a more realistic sense of a person being behind you, but overall this pieces concept is still not completely lost. I also discovered that a collection of suburban field recordings I did over Christmas in Brighton with the Sound Devices 633 and Sennheister M-S Stereo Shotgun fitted perfectly within the surrounding soundscape.
There are sparrows and other birds in the garden, which can be almost indistinguishable from the birdsong I had captured. I believe this is down to the fact these recordings are outside. So they enter the inside resonance for the first time when they are played back. I decided to add Car noises, Dogs parking, planes flying overhead, birdsong and footsteps in other environments to add ambiance to the space that could exist there.
Hopefully, this causes people to second guess the outside environment as well as the inside environment, these sounds worked a lot better than the footsteps and felt like a good breakthrough to the process. I mixed most of this tonight and will do the rest on the commute tomorrow.
Day 4
I set up a second Bass Rocker above the doorway to the Reception. I tacked all the wires around the skirting and ran it all from underneath the sofa.
After day 3, I was pretty set on just playing a mono file. But Michael encouraged me to try stereo. I placed one above the door on the reception area. This made the footsteps sound better, as you get less locality with the sounding of the footsteps. Now, one resonates below you, and the other above you. In a sense it creates a strange kind of vertical stereo. But the effect is subtle. After an elongated time setting up the second speaker and routing the wires. I finally got the looped 2 and a half hour piece running through the raspberry Pi. I think this is the best working placement for the transducers and I am happy with the sounds they are producing. The fact they are set up in different rooms gets more spatialized quality which is what I initially wanted for the sound placement.
Private View
Sounds are performing fine for the final view. If I had more time I would potentially have made them slightly louder, or adjusted the timings to make the sounds more frequent. Like I had imagined might be the case, the sounds are mostly disguised by the other sound pieces in the space so aren’t that noticeable. However, within the framework of the piece’s initial concept, this works quite well. It’s hard to fine tune these details and I feel potentially less is more in this instance. I was mostly testing my sounds intermittently when not all installations were running – and it was never going to be easy to fine tune. Maybe if the transducers were louder and could take more ohms… next time I would try using an even more powerful amp/speakers to boost the signal, so there would be a chance to tweak the sound more. In this piece’s current state the amplifier is completely cranked to full, which isn’t entirely optimal in terms of making adjustments.