David Morris: Hearing-Hereing

Howdy all,
 
Please find below a follow through on the 'breakthrough' in the previous email I sent round...a beginning of a proposal for what I hope might work...

Thanks to Andrew Foster for either deliberately or by accident writing me a email asking with the subject line "What happens when we can’t here our steps?" and then in the content asking about what happens when we can't hear our steps--which led me to the concept of "hereing" in relation to "hearing". And thanks to Tristana for teaching me about haunting.

David
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Hearing-Hereing

Hearing-Hereing is an interactive environment that varies the way one hears the place one is in so as to help reveal how “hereing” occurs.

That is, Hearing-Hereing helps reveal how it is that one engenders a sense of being-here, as the being that one is, has been and will be—how one gains a sense of being a being with such and such an identity in such and such an identifiable place. It does this by varying the acoustic aspect of the moving, bodily, engagement with places around oneself through which one “heres” oneself in the everyday world.

Hearing-Hereing is at once an artwork and a phenomenological experiment, the one by way of the other.

As artwork, participants are co-creators of Hearing-Hereing. While participants are passive to the acoustic variations that Hearing-Hereing induces in one’s everyday engagement with the world, the active world-engagement of the participant produces what Hearing-Hereing reveals and is. If Hearing-Hereing were a painting, it would be a painting that would be produced by the participants looking about, given the varied way the world looks at/to her. With Hearing-Hereing, the varied way the world sounds invites a way of sounding out the world a new, producing a differently sounded world.

As phenomenological experiment, this means that while Hearing-Hereing induces basic variations in the participant’s acoustic experience, we as phenomenological experimenters are not interested in these variations as such. We are not interested, for example, in measuring effects of these variations so as to interpret the participant’s experience as a causally induced result that disturbs hearing as acoustic reconstruction of a objectified sonic environment. We are interested in how the participants efforts to live, move, and “here” themselves in the interactively-varied environment creates new variations on experience. We are interested in describing these variations of experience so as to disclose something
about the sense of “hereing.” That is, the variations we passively induce in hearing are not to be measured in terms of an already determined and conceptualized space of variations. They are rather a means to reveals variations in “hereing” as a process that is acoustically mediated.

As an analogy, we might think of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological analyses, in The Phenomenology of Perception, of situations in which someone’s objective body has been varied; the point of such analyses is
not to show how this induces a departure from a norm, but to reveal the space of possible variations on making sense of the world. As another analogy, just as one is not interested in what a person sees on the page in the Rorschach inkblot, but in what she/he makes of it, so too we are not interested in what the participant hears vs. what they should be hearing, but what she/he makes of the environment—how she/he sounds out the world and thence “heres” her/himself.

Basic Description of Hearing-Hereing as Interactive Environment

The main components of Hearing-Hereing as an interactive environment are: the soundplace, the mike-matrix, the virtual ears, and the tracker.

The soundplace: This component produces the sound of the place in which the participant moves. (Think of the sense of the word “sound” when we speak of a place like Puget sound.) We are envisioning the sounds of a place like an office: an alarm clock going off, a computer beeping, a door opening, a phone ringing, something clanking a waste paper basket, a book falling over, papers rustling in the wind, a fire truck going by outside, etc. The soundplace will be constructed so as to let us produce sounds temporally in/out of synch with the associate visual events, or spatially in place/displaced with the associated visual location. It might also be possible to produce the sounds of the office without the office being visually there, for example, to have the items in the office be visually projected on to the walls. An alternative might be to use a kitchen as an exemplary place, given our interest in thinking, via this project, about
how people dealing with memory and movement difficulties navigate and pragmatically handle everyday tasks like preparing foods in a kitchen.

The participants own movement will be part of the soundplace. E.g., bells on the ankles, clicky metal on the shoes, crinkly paper coveralls, bangles on the wrists, wristwatch alarms, will be deployed so that the participant produces sound as she/he moves about.

We want to see how the participant navigates and orients—“heres”—in this soundplace, and how they describe the experience of: themselves, this place, orienting, memory, identity, in this environment.

The mike-matrix: This is a matrix of microphones suspended above the soundplace.

The virtual ears: The virtual ears are the central device of Hearing-Hereing. Participants will wear active noise-cancelling or passive noise-blocking earphones. A binaural microphone pair will be placed either
on the two ears (outside the headphone) or on two shoulders (etc.). The microphones on the participant and in the mike-matrix will feed into a Max/MSP processing environment and then be fed back into the participant’s earphones in such a way as to allow the participant to hear with different ears than the everyday. For example, left-right ‘channels’ can be reversed, effective space between ears increased, etc. The virtual ears processing loop also records what the participant is hearing and what the microphones are picking up. The loop between the participant and the Max/MSP (four channels, 2 inputs from mikes, 2 outputs to headphones) will either be wireless, or tethered through a wire suspended from overhead with a bungee cord or spring, etc. to take up slack.

The tracker: This tracks the location of the participant and also (we hope) head direction.

Initial Scenarios for Hearing-Hereing

The following involve variations on the virtual ears. They can be run against variations on the soundplace in which things sound where they are and in synch, or desynchronization and displacement scenarios.

Stratton: named in honour of Stratton’s famous experiments with ‘inverting the visual field’ through left-right ‘reversals’ induced by lenses (studied by Merleau-Ponty), this scenario ‘inverts the auditory field’ by feeding the output of the left-hand mike on the participant into the participant’s right ear and vice versa.

Lag: various delays are introduced into the loop between the participant’s left-hand mikes and left-hand earphone, similarly with the right hand.

Slew: disparate lags on left vs. right hand channels.

Cyclops: LR are (through various algorithms to be determined) combined into one monaural signal that is fed into both L and R earphone

Whirligig: L R channels are processed through a Wurlitzer like effect so that sound spins between the ears. (Could be too much!!)

Disembodied: participant hears not through mikes on her/his body, but through mikes in the matrix. I.e. she/he does hear ‘from’ where she/he is, but from fixed points in the soundplace.

Detached: spectral filtering knocks out high or low ends, etc. to produce muffling, as if one has a terrible cold and can’t quite acoustically
connect with the world.

Haunted: participant hears what happened a few minutes ago, rather than what’s happening now. The participant is haunted by the acoustic past, is followed by her/himself.

Haunted-Here: participant hears what happened last time she was at this spot. I.e., the sound stream from the participant’s mike is recorded and tagged with location data, and the processing loop feeds back data by looking back for past sound from this location, and mixing it in to what’s happening now. Need to have a fade in fade to get rid of annoying artifacts. The participant is haunted by what happened here.

Other-Haunted: as above, but the participant is hearing data recorded from previous sessions recorded with other participants.