Link to Harvestworks
Introduction
The Nous Sonic headphone tracking system triggers sounds as visitors wearing the Nous headphones enter the various shapes that contain composed and /or collected sounds within each virtual room. The residency at Nolan House gives us the opportunity to evolve the work adding and modifying the soundscapes over the duration of the residency.
Portals and Scene Switches
As of the weekend of Sept 22, we have reconfigured the sound scape. Visitors enter and pickup headsets that are activated listening to a “homeroom” narration. The orange “portals” are wormholes that bring you to various composed soundscapes composed by each of the participating artists.
As you move to the space just in front of each portal, you will here a “bing” that notifies the listener you are about to trigger a scene switch entered through stepping into the orange portals. You will hear the name of the artist for the scene you are entering. After a few seconds, you will then here the composition of the new soundscape.
In all the scenes, the visitor can return to the homeroom via the portal to the right of the fireplace in the lower room.
From Edelstein’s first scene, there is a portal that brings the listener to an additional Edelstein scene. As the work evolves, we will be adding additional scenes for deeper exploration and listening.
The arrows show the possible transitions between the different soundscapes and compositions.
The Harvestworks staff at Nolan House can help visitors understand how to navigate using the location tracking headphones.
LocaleS3 Scene Shift Map as of Sept 29
Evolution towards a Labryinth
For the opening on Sept 1, 2023, visitors came to Michelle sound scape that had portals to David’s and Phil’s.
We then added a homeroom for Sept 22 that provided narration and portals to the three core scene. Phil and Michelle provided an additional scene.
Future evolution proposed to date will extend the soundscape offering further opportunity for exploration.
Nolan House Floor Plan v1
This is the configuration map for the opening September 1 and active through Sept 7.
3D View – Michelle Scene
The Nous UWB tracking system allows the composers to arrange location of sound in 3 dimensions. Our initial scenes are simple 2d projections. We have the opportunity in the future to explore location of sound not just in the XY plane but also Z axis of height.
David’s Notes – scene shift abstraction and sketches, instructions for configuration as of Sept 1 …
Here is a bit of history of how the work has evolved from one perspective.
This room contains more than one sound sculpture.
Use the Portals throughout to find them all.
Make your first choice the moment you have passed the threshhold...
<<== Portal to Edelstein
STRAIGHT
FORWARD Enter Jaffe directly
==>> Portal to Reeder
LISTEN FOR THE BELL
TO DISCOVER...
Portals throughout each sculpture
which lead to the others.
Placement of UWB Antennas
The infrastructure of the Nous tracking system is a network of Ultra Wide Band (UWB) beacons. There is a transponder in each headset that pings each of the beacons and then triangulates the location of the headset in 3 dimensions. The relative location of each beacon is critical.
Background – Michelle Jaffé – Phil Edelstein – David Reeder
Michelle Jaffé met David Reeder in 2003 while she was Artist-in-Residence at the Computer Music Department at Brooklyn College, under Amnon Wolman.
Jaffé asked Reeder to program SuperCollider so the two of them could spatialize her 27:00-minute composition for Wappen Field.
https://michellejaffe.com/sound-video/wappen-field–2003-2015
Michelle Jaffé and Phil Edelstein started working together at the Rainforest IV workshop at Caramoor Music Festival 2014. The next project was a performance of Edelstein’s Impulsions at fEAT in Stony Brook LI. 2016: Stony Brook University, 50th Anniversary of Experiments in Art & Technology, cDACT
The three came together in 2018 sharing ideas for joint works. After gestation period during, common interests in composing, sound in space, software began coalescing to a series of projects. The first of which is this residency proposal for Harvestworks.
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