SONIC TRAJECTORY
CONCEPTUAL ORIENTATION
All humans use some form of internal map to navigate and move around within their environment. The quality and detail of the map may differ based on familiarity with the area and the information relevant to the task or activity at hand, but it exists nonetheless. Maps appear to be cultural universals among humans (Golledge 1999), from the typically thorough and meticulous Cartesian maps so prevalent in western culture to the basic strip maps that require no scale, orientation, or frame of reference. Mapping is a system of breaking down and organizing spatial information in absolute and relative distances, navigable by transposing the mapped information onto the real world through use of visible landmarks, guides, regions or terrain features.
What is conspicuously absent from most frameworks of mapping, however, are queues for the remaining senses. Maps are very visually biased, most require being decoded through vision and then applied to the real world through the visual system. This may seem strange when you consider that, while dominant, the visual system is by no means the only sense that humans use while navigating. Imagine getting into your vehicle wearing earplugs, nose plugs, and heavily padded hockey gloves. The absence of these sensorial queues would make the drive much more difficult and disorienting, possibly even nauseating. I wouldn’t recommend trying this in the state of California, where lawmakers find the sense of hearing so important that they have made it illegal to operate a vehicle while your hearing is impaired by headphones. Including sonic features in a map would add another layer of depth that could aid in the task of navigation. Nevertheless, sound is a dimension of our physical environment that is all too often ignored. The sense of sound is a powerful tool to help humans locate objects in space, and has powerful psychological and emotional characteristics as well –when was the last time you saw a pattern so great that you just couldn’t resist the urge to get up and dance?
The inspiration for this piece came from musings of sound and movement. Worn and drained from hours of tossing and turning at the cruel will of my insomnia, I began to dream up a work that would use sound and space to simulate the desperate pursuit for peace and sleep that an insomniac faces each night. As I pondered over the task of motivating a person to flee or pursue an invisible, intangible sound source I began to contemplate sound and its ability to guide our movement. I came to realize that this was a very small window into the idea of using sound to navigate, an area that in its entirety has seen far too little work. So I set out to create a way of mapping space using sound as the primary means for navigation.
RELATED WORK
Richard Long used sound as a mapping tool in a simple but significant way in his piece “Sound Circle, a walk on the Dartmoor.” As he walked, he noted the sounds at various locations along the circumference of a circle, and plotted them on the map at the location where it was heard. Richard Long lacked computers, GPS devices, and fancy recording equipment. He did not need to produce or record sound. What he did was to simply introduce the idea of using sonic qualities of a mapped area as points of reference on the map. The sounds themselves were not the main focus; to me main focus is the idea that sound itself was an important part of the environment of that location, worthy of being included on a map. I took away from this the concept that audio information, just like visual information, can be used to reference a real location.
Another proponent of the importance of sound location mapping is Simon Elvins. In his piece Silent London, Simon Elvins uses sound level information collected by the government to create a sonic map of London indicating the cities quietest locations. Elvins went a step beyond Long by elevating sonic qualities of a location to such a level that it deserves an entire map of its own. The map was created in traditional ink as well as an embossed map that elevated the quietest areas. Like Long, Elvins used fairly simple tools to make his point. According to Elvins, Silent London “intends to reveal a hidden landscape of quiet spaces and shows an alternate side of the city that would normally go unnoticed” (Elvins 2005). I share his desire to reveal something that would normally go unnoticed with respect to using sound as a means of navigation and mapping.
A much more metaphorical perspective of location and sound come from Teri Rueb’s “Drift.” In Drift, the sounds take on a life of their own. The sounds are recordings of footsteps and spoken poetry, they move with the flow of the Watten Sea as if guided by the tides. Underlying the piece is the idea of wandering, and the meaning of being lost. In an age where location can be so easily plotted by GPS, knowing one’s absolute location is achieved quite easily. Why then has the concept of being lost not vanished? Rueb suggests that being lost is not linked to knowing precisely where you are, per se. As I understand it, the experience of being somewhere is what a human uses to judge a location, not a set of numbers determining its exact position in time and space. The characteristics of a space, among which the sonic qualities weigh heavily, are what we use to judge a “somewhere.” Another important aspect of this piece is the idea of giving sounds a life of their own. By allotting these sounds a space and allowing them to move about with the tides, Rueb embodies these sounds as tangible objects within our environment. Thinking of sounds spatially makes the task of locating a sound in space or using a sound to orient yourself becomes a less daunting one.
Mark Shepard’s “Tactical Sound Garden” is a more technologically advanced example of embodied sound. The Tactical Sound Garden is an audio installation that allows users to use WiFi internet connections to create, maintain, and interact with a virtual garden of sounds. Users “plant” sounds at locations, while other users can plant their own sounds or edit others’ by “pruning” them. This piece uses advanced software components, including a 3D audio engine common to video game applications, along with GPS and other location sensitive equipment to accurately place the user within a virtual world of embodied sounds. This piece shows the potential for creating and interacting with sounds in real time that could be very useful in sound mapping applications.
EXPECTED OUTCOME
For this piece I intend to create a way of mapping a location such that the space is navigable by sound queues. To achieve this, I will create an applet with Macromedia Flash that will provide me with a Cartesian plane that corresponds to a real plane. On this plane I will create sound beacons, which will subsequently be used to guide the user in navigating through the area defined by the plane. The user will be asked to follow the sound beacons to navigate a predetermined path.
First and foremost, I expect that the users – and hopefully the subsequent viewers – will come away with a new understanding of the use of sound for navigating. I intend to show that sound qualities, just like visual qualities, possess sufficient characteristics to be used as adequate guides and references for navigation.
I expect that users will first be confused by this paradigm shift in navigation. I believe that the confusion will quickly subside, however, as the mapping of sound should be quite natural despite its unfamiliarity. The human body is quite equipped to judge relative location based on sound properties.
As for the effectiveness and accuracy of the path selection, I do not expect my predetermined path to be replicated perfectly. By the same token, I would not expect a person foreign to the concept who is being handed a traditional bird’s eye view Cartesian map for the very first time to be able to navigate a perfect path on his first attempt. Nor do I expect that my technical abilities will offer the user with a perfect representation of the sound in space. The use of complex software and 3D audio engines are a bit out of my reach, but I expect that with the depth of information provided by audio I will be able to create a path that will be navigable by the queues I can create. I am a major supporter of the postmodernist idea that the meaning of the art is created by the audience, and I look forward to seeing the response of the users to this new concept of navigation.
STAGING
The staging of this locative and performative piece is carried out through the use of a laptop computer, headphones, and original software designed by me in Macromedia Flash. A participant is fitted with the headphones, and a tone is presented to them. This tone has a location simulated by the balance and the arrival time of the sound in each ear. As the participant moves, I mimic their movement within the computer program. When the participant moves closer to the ethereal sound beacon, the sound becomes more frequent. When their back is turned to the sound source, a harsh tone overrides. This explanation is the extent of the instructions given to the participant before telling them to find the invisible sound source.
After nearly 10 hours of travel by caravan, we arrived at the performance site, the White Mountain Crooked Creek Research Station at a staggering 10,200’ elevation. In this secluded mountain enclave, miles outside of the range of most cell phones, I soon found that my wireless headphones failed due to radio interference. Not long after, I found that my video camera had also suffered a power failure. In an environment as serene and beautiful as the White Mountains, however, these technical difficulties are not nearly enough to lower one’s spirits. I pulled out my trusty wired headphones, and relinquished the documentation to GPS track logs and the video help of some of my peers.
The landscape of these mountains were spectacular, peaks rising hundreds of feet from the creek station with virtually no land to steep to traverse. I located several areas surrounding the station that were suitable for the performance of my piece, with terrain that was conducive to traversal without offering visible paths to bias the participants’ movement. After scouting these locations, I proceeded to recruit participants. None of the participants had any prior knowledge of the task I was to ask them to perform.
After fitting a participant with the headphones, they took just moments to get their bearings. As can be seen from the track logs, which captured the user’s location every 30 seconds, their movement was quite deterministic with very little wandering. Some participants followed the path of least resistance, walking casually and following the sound. The green path shows a participant who followed the winding creek to the sound source, rather than scaling the low rolling hills. The yellow path shows a user who preferred to run straight across it.
One user even sprinted up the face of the mountain, leaving me stumbling behind, tripping over headphone cables and fumbling to keep a hold of the laptop.
RESULTS
I was surprised by the speed with which users learned to navigate through use of sound queues. Most of the participants stood in place and turned about for just a few moments to get their bearings before setting off to seek the invisible sound beacon. I was also surprised by the accuracy and efficiency of the paths that the participants took. There was very little disorientation or wandering off course, despite the simplicity of the sound queues and my program. I only had the capability to guide the participant in 4 cardinal directions and could not guide them on a diagonal path. I did not inform them of them of this limitation, and even as they walked naturally in 360 degrees of motion they were able to find the sound source to which I was trying to guide them.
As for the degree to which the participants gained a new perspective on navigation, I can not be certain. The success of my sonic mapping in guiding users is enough for me to feel satisfied with the outcome of this project. At the very least all who participated have now experienced navigation by sonic queues, and all participants walked away with a smile on their face.
References
“Drift” Teri Rueb. http://www.terirueb.net/drift/index.html
“Simon Elvins: Mapping Sound” Generator.x. Tom C. 6/28/06. http://www.generatorx.no/20060628/simon-elvins-mapping-sound/
“Tactical Sound Garden” Mark Shepard. Leonardo Electronic Almanac, 2006. http://leoalmanac.org/gallery/locative/tsg/index.htm
Wayfinding Behavior, Reginald Golledge. 1999 John’s Hopkins University Press.