Description

What is it that I am trying to do with technology?

Firstly, in the process of building some sort of multi channel dispersion system, I am playing with sound in a very spatial sense.  What am I trying to achieve in doing this?  Really, what I have always had I'm mind is synthesizing soundscapes indeed the soundscape) from a systemic viewpoint.  That is, from a compositional viewpoint I am interested not in producing compositions per se but defining and constructing a system which produces an ongoing soundscape that interrogates the very functional principals of soundscape - the way in which it is created and way in which it is experienced, the way in which it is perceived and the way in which it is recognized.  That is, I am looking to setup a system in a space and leave it there such that I can interact with the system in an ongoing manner to learn about the relationship between the functional modes of repetition as they can be employed in a systematic, compositional and constructive manner.  The content itself is not of interest so much as is the ability to investigate the modes of repetition through the content and to use the modes of repetition to generate content.

In that sense it doesn't matter what the technology or system is so long as it can be defined and investigated both conceptually and practically through the modes as they have been and are being defined.  Nonetheless, in aiding with the construction of a thesis that can investigate the manifestations of repetition in soundscape systems to some interesting and useful depth, I require, if you like , the equivalent of a laboratory environment for synthesizing and analyzing a said system of a certain degree of complexity.  It's not so much about building a directional sound propagation system but a system within which distinctions can be made of all the basic modal manifestations of repetition.  This requires a degree of clarity such that inter-oscillator memetic circulation, for example, can be observed, to subsequently build a foundation for understanding the recombinant properties of the modes of repetition and they way in which they constitute the soundscape.  hence, I need speakers then that reproduce not exactly high fidelity but certainly discernible acoustic characteristics of the signal being fed into them.  Nonetheless, the speaker itself serves as an interesting manifestation of both oscillation in voice and circulation in dispersion in that it is responsible for some of the distinct character in the voices reproducible by the system.  Similarly the quantity of speakers needs to be sufficient to produce a sufficient and discernible spatial polyphony - a significant and distinguishable spread of voices across and throughout the space such that the interactions between the oscillators is more easily observable without listener fatigue. 

This all brings me to the central question of the thesis really, and that is how do these modes of repetition function within the soundscape to produce meaningful human-environment interactions, and subsequently to reproduce the modes themselves as a product of those interactions.  In other words, what is the life of a soundscape, or acoustic niche, and how is it observable, definable and hence recognizable as living, healthy and/or otherwise?