Meeting with Sam Wiehl

We wanted to sound out our ideas and get some first-hand industry knowledge. Sam’s background is in graphic design, however he has moved into multimedia art and art direction. He is the co-founder of the electronic music organization Hive. We hoped that he would be able to help us clarify some of the key points of our project.

Initially we explained the premise of the project, our intentions to manipulate movement with sound, to produce a visual movement map of individual’s responses to selected sounds. Because of Sam’s practical understanding of sound based installations he was able to ask direct questions to help focus our ideas. He recommended that participants are told a clear set of instructions to help guide them through the experiment, also to let them know what we were measuring, what we expected and to give them incentive to behave in the way we wanted. Although it takes away some of the mystery and intrigue, it will help get more of a reaction from participants. Our original fears were that if we put participants in a dark room and played sounds they would be intimidated and scared and subsequently not move at all.

We had decided that part of the incentive to participate would be a copy of the publication (including a thank you list of all participants) and maybe a fabric sample of the participant’s footprint. Sam suggested that we include a sound profile for participants, we developed this further to tell participants that the best 15 sound profiles would make it on to the final cd. Each participant would receive a copy of the publication, a fabric sample and a cd. Although this is a considerable workload, it would hopefully bring in enough participants to make an interesting set of data.

We had previously timetabled ourselves a week to research sound installations and sensory installations more thoroughly before we decided on specific sounds that we would use. After talking to Sam, we started to think about introducing more interaction by giving the participant a choice. Participants would have to choose between different sounds, turning ones off and on depending on how they felt about the sound. This would create an individual sound profile for each participant.

After the meeting, our idea felt more rounded and focused. There are some other specifics to iron out in terms of the instructions, and types of sounds. In a way it raised more questions about the practical side of the installation, but also made it feel that there was a real possibility to do something fun and interesting with sound.

Sam said he would happily participate.