Abstract

Abstract:

Sound and reactionary movement interactive installation.

We are hoping to explore movement, mood and sound, through an interactive sound installation. Our initial idea focused on the movement of people through a space and how we could record and manipulate their movement and mood using sound. Combining data collection and visualization processes with interactive sound, we hope to create individual sound profiles and visual responses for our participants.

Participants will be videoed and recorded, interacting with a number of specifically selected sounds, responding physically to each, and then choosing a number of their favourite/most interesting sounds to create an sound profile. Participants will perform the experiment twice with a different collection of sounds, selected to be a significant contrast to the prior.

‘We have an unconscious relationship with sound on a day to day basis’ (Julian Treasure, 2009)

Sound affects us in different ways: physiological for example increased heart rate and production of cortisone, psychological for example birdsong to most is a reassuring sound and behavioural, put most simply, we move away from unpleasant sounds and towards pleasant ones. (TED Talk, Oxford 2009)

The sounds will be selected based on specific links with mood. For example, the first set of sounds, ‘pleasant’ sounds, will be linked with happy feelings, contentment and joy. The second set of sounds, ‘unpleasant’ sounds, will be linked with feelings of fear, anxiety and discomfort.

Through researching the phenomenon of synesthesia, the stimulation of one sensory pathway leading to the involuntary experience of another, we hope to explore the ways in which movement and sound interact to create a visualization of sound. Our participants will be asked to physically respond to the sounds they hear. This will be recorded through their footprints. Their ‘soundwalking’ in combination with their audio sound profile will help up build an audio/visual archive, exploring the relationship between auditory and visual.

Participants will be asked to select a colour before they enter the experiment. We anticipate that the colours selected will be representational of the mood of the participant upon entering the experiment. The participant will be specifically asked about their ‘feelings’ after the experiment. In a 2006 study by Rikard Kuller into ‘the impact of light and colour on psychological mood’ they concluded that the use of good colour design might contribute to a more positive mood. We hope to see a distinct correlation between the colours selected and the mood of the participant.

We will be using our own group skill base to create a number of responses to the data collected. The purpose of the project is to experiment with the data collection process. The outcome will be entirely dependent on the data collected during the experiment, which in essence is unpredictable. We can only hypothesis about potential outcomes based on existing research. This could take the form of a data visualization publication, a series of sound visualization colour and fabric swatches. We could potentially produce a series of animated soundscapes using the ‘soundwalking’ data as part of the sound profile cd.