Untitled - Blue

2004
Dublin Institute of Technology (Dublin, Ireland)

An unused corridor space
One end opens onto a busy atrium
The other end is closed, leading to an undefined space
A vertical shaft half-way through the horizontal defined by the corridor cuts a channel through the building, exposing windows leading into classrooms
The sounds of a water feature (a slow-moving fountain) and students' voices from the atrium reverberate softly within the corridor, tracing a peripheral activity

In 2004 a group of architecture students from the Dublin School of Architecture at DIT invited me to create a sound installation that could be presented as part of their end of year / graduate show. I was presented with the opportunity to install a work inside the school adjacent to the rooms where the students' models and drawings would be shown. I asked if I could alternatively site my work in an essentially vacated corridor space that intersected the campus' outdoor atrium, near the entryway to the building.

After a series of site visits and field-recordings, I profiled an installation that suggested a fluid vector or movement that proceeded from the atrium through the corridor, exploring the horizontal and vertical spaces both as distinct spatial entities and in combination as a more complex aural space.

Six clusters of speakers were arranged within the corridor space. Two high-fidelity studio monitors were placed one at either end of the corridor to provide a deep, full-range listening experience throughout the space. Just under the opening to the vertical shaft, I arranged clusters of tiny full-range component speakers (one cluster on either side of the corridor). Within the vertical space I suspended two sets of mid-range speakers, one halfway up the space, the other just at the top.

In addition to the speakers, I set up a control center for the installation at the far end of the corridor, consisting of a desktop computer and a control surface with a series of faders (to control / tune the software during the installation).

I made several field-recordings at this location to serve as content for the installation as follows:

1. Close-miked recordings of water flowing through the fountain in the atrium
2. Wind passing through the corridor
3. Voices within the atrium
4. Voices within the corridor (distant, reverberating, filtered)
5. Contact-mic explorations of various decaying surfaces within the unused corridor, including rusty metal and broken concrete

The final installation consisted of a software patch designed in Pure Data that allowed the different locational recordings to be combined into groups of textures (created through subtle granulation, artificial reverberation, and feedback loops / resampling) and set along different paths that would be panned through the speaker array to create different senses of movement within the corridor and projecting up into the vertical shaft.

The audience generally discovered the space as individuals or couples, as they entered or exited the architecture graduate show. At times a small group would form as people stayed to listen to the space, or engaged in conversations about the possibilities of using sound to activate unused spaces such as the corridor. I used the control surface to adjust the software in order to illustrate how the perception of the space could be altered through slight shifts in the installation's volume, the speed of the movement of the sounds through the spatialized system, and the degree to which the sound textures utilized processing instead of the direct / natural field recordings. I also discussed how such a prototype (including this control system) could be used as a site-specific tool for developing the form of a sound installation which might be then permanently installed as a fixed infrastructure within the site.

The atmosphere created by the installation acted as an extension of the water fountain in the main atrium space, as the sounds that were produced suggested a fluid, aquatic space. Standing in the atrium, the movement of sounds within the corridor was heard as a series of gentle crescendos and decrescendos which beckoned the audience to come closer and enter the corridor. Within the corridor, the acoustics of the horizontal and vertical spaces were exposed through the constantly shifting soundscape, encouraging the audience to navigate through the space to listen to it from different locations and perspectives.