The Nomadic Ear.

Sonography, Cartography and the design of Sonic Narratives for Non-Linear Experience.

Preamble; getting immersed.

In discussing Immersive Environments we find ourselves at the mercy of a phalanx of aqueous meta-phors, saturated in an inescapable lexicon that engulfs our senses, saturating our frames in the fluid medium of sound.  So be it; let us be carried away on the flood to be inundated in the ocean of sound.  This text is concerned with concepts of spatiality, of location and the interactions of sounding bodies that articulate and activate the soundscape, how we as auditors experience the sonic domain and how we as authors compose and construct compelling immersive audioscapes.

Imagine a child of the ‘jet-age’ living in an unobtrusive coastal village, mid-way between the dwelling of Blake, the artist, poet and visionary and that of his friend, the scientist and astronomer Halley.  The child proceeds with eyes wide open to technics and ears tuned to poetics ……

Theoretical papers often quote Plato’s Cave – such a nice, primitive dawn of consciousness image, with its shadowy representations flickering sootily across the cave’s rear wall and the line of onlookers warming their backs by the fire!  Strangely there is scant mention of the crackle of burning wood, or the sounds of those protagonists prancing around the flames, not to mention the perfectly formed sound reflections returning from the cave’s surfaces.  With a moment’s contemplation it should be clear that the ‘captive audience’ seated in the cave would have understood significantly more from their audio environment than from the appallingly low-tech visuals!

2 + 2 =..... was delivered as part of the “SoundCulture96” conference to parallel the “Silent Forest” installation and “A Silent Forest” radio broadcast. As such the paper provides a brief overview of some of my general interests as a sound sculptor in a confluence of morphology, spatiality and technology. The text, which follows remains in its original presentation form (bad jokes included).

"Are the sounds issuing from (the instrumentation connected to) Stelarc’s body real, or not?"