Audiovox is a sound art piece I’ve been working on with friend and collaborator Rupinder Singh Sidhu (a.k.a. “Rup”).
Last night Audiovox debuted at the opening for the Surge Festival of Urban Digital Culture as part of the StoryBox project.
Audiovox is a multichannel interactive audio installation. Speakers are arranged throughout the space such that on first approach a dissonant melange of sounds is heard. Moving through the speaker array towards the focal point of the piece, the soundscape becomes more and more harmonious. At the center, where the sound is the most harmonious, visitors can explore and affect the soundscape via a patchbay-like interface.
The patchbay interface consists of 11 headphone jacks, a dangling connection cable, and it’s own speaker system. Visitors can plug their own headphones directly into the jacks, or patch a signal through to the speaker, which projects down from overhead. Each of the patches outputs a different recording of stories recorded at the recent Vancouver Storytelling Festival, and while the experience of those stories are themselves the true focal point of the piece, the patchbay is the interface which enables that experience. As such, we felt that its form was going to be crucially important to the overall aesthetic of the piece. The image of a book seemed to be the perfect metaphor – after all it is a “literal” story box – so we decided to build our patchbay into a book. We originally explored the idea of modifying an actual book for this purpose, but some early prototypes taught us that this wasn’t likely to be practical. We decided instead to build a book from scratch.
The sounds used in the Audiovox piece were sourced from both the Storytelling Festival and from workshops held with the StoryBox project participants. The material was absolutely beautiful to work with. Collaborating with Rup to arrange this material into a multichannel composition was a magical process, full of serendipity. Most the pieces just fell together perfectly, seemingly with a will of their own.
The piece really has to be experienced first-hand, so please visit the gallery while the show is up:
Audiovox will be showing until August 28, 2010 at the W2 gallery, 151 W. Cordova, Vancouver, B.C.