This page contains a virtual walkthrough of the installation, using video and audio recordings. It will show each step in the installation, demonstrated by my friends Sean, Nick, Kristina, and Heath. They wore binaural microphones while being recorded (you can see everyone wearing them, they look like earbud headphones), so the sound on these clips is (theoretically) exactly what they were hearing. Listen on headphones for the full effect.
A small sign outside of the tent invited users to walk inside and turn on the switch that dangled from the ceiling:
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As you can see, the sound would not start up until the user had moved around a bit. This encouraged and rewarded movement, showing the listener that their movements were directly correlated with the sound.
The sound design began with a multidimensional composition entitled 'BeepBeepBeepBeep'. By moving around the space the listener could move between field recordings of the city and country, interspersed with snippets of conversations between myself and my classmates regarding the nature of sound in space. Getting very close to the speakers would trigger barely audible whispering and distorted talking, encouraging the user to get even closer:
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If the listener moved around the space enough, the sound environment would transition to a song, 'Nights When I Am Lonely'. The movements and location of the user would trigger different samples, as well as control various parameters such as filters and gates:
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Once that song had been explored, the sound would revert back to 'BeepBeepBeepBeep', picking up where it left off. Here the sound design played mixing field recordings from Tesco's with recordings in the countryside in the Borders of Scotland. The cash register beeps were slowly mixed with birds chirping (and my own piano playing) depending on the location of the listener. In addition, snippets of discussions regarding bird songs and country sounds were once again interspersed, but slightly more chaotic than before:
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Once again, if enough movement was detected a second song would be triggered, a folky ballad named 'Head Home'. The location of the user controlled the overall arrangement of the piece, changing it from a piano duet to an accordian/guitar piece, as well as changing effects on the voice, drums, and accordian, and launching different verses of the song:
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The cycle ended with the last 'chapter' of 'BeepBeepBeepBeep'. This section was a mixture of many layers of my piano playing, mixed with a combination of all of the sounds that came before. Falling chords take over from singing birds, fragments of voices mix with faraway sounds of the city, and the user can move through the piano and towards the bits of sound that follow them around the space. Once the listener had moved around enough the cycle would start again from the beginning, and they could switch it off (or stick around for another go):
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Here is an edited video of several people using the installation, to show how each person explored the space differently. The sound is a mixture of recordings made during the filming, using binaural headphones, and represents the average time spent in 'You are here' by the volunteers.
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The sound design for 'You are here' was composed of many layers of sound and music that were explored by the listener by moving around the space.
The main composition was entitled 'BeepBeepBeepBeep' and was a collection of carefully chosen field recordings and conversations about sound, mixed with my own piano playing.
To get a better idea of what these layers sounded like, here are a few of them separately.
I recorded several conversations between myself and some classmates about the nature of sound in the country and the city, using quotes from R. Murray Schafer's 'Soundscape' as a basis for the talks. These provided a bit of a narrative element to the installation. The first section began with my voice explaining the project to one of these classmates:
As you could hear, the voices become progessively layered. By the middle of the piece the voices were all around the room, their location dictated partially by the location of the listener:
I also used outakes from these conversations. They would only play when the listener moved very close to a speaker, and even then only very quietly, to encourage them to move even closer:
Various field recordings were also used. At the beginning of the piece, for example, staying in the middle of the room would trigger this recording, of birds chirping in the countryside. You will notice they get more and more distorted and dream-like towards the end:
Moving to the sides of the room at the beginning would send you to the Water of Leith in Edinburgh, a riverside with cars far away in the distance:
The middle and end of the piece featured recordings in a Tesco's supermarket mixed with recordings from the Scottish Borders. The transition is subtle (and was dictated by the movements of the user):
The piece also featured several layers of piano, particularly towards the end, which could be explored and manipulated by moving around the space:
All of these elements, and many more, would be mixed together depending on the listener's location and movements. To give you an idea of the final product, here is a stereo mix of one potential version of "BeepBeepBeepBeep":