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The lidar scanner will record new steps within 24 hours. The time will move forward while the audience climbs up the steps, and vice versa.
Some narratives phrase cooperate with audio could enhance the immersive experience of the audience, the audience would be able to imagine their own story in their mind:
Early morning
“The fresh air and quietness of the morning are just what I needed.”
“Is there any coffee shop open?”
Morning
“Do you know which classroom are we going to today?”
“Nooo, I am late”
“I will be there in 5 mins”
I’m a bit winded, but the peace and solitude of this place is worth it.”
Afternoon
“Be careful with your steps”
“The steps kill me”
“I guess the dungeon is over there”
Night
“It is a long day”
“What’s the next place we are going?”
“See, the street lights are on”
“Just arriving! Would you please leave a door for me?”
Midnight
Singing of the drunkard
couple quarreling
Ambient Sound/Sound List
In the morning, you can hear the sound of cyclists carrying bicycles up and down the stairs (such as the sound of bicycles hitting the railings).
At night, fireflies gather on the street lamps. When you accidentally disturb them, they will fly away.
If you stay on a step for a long time, a wired noise will be generated by the steps
Future Plan
As a group, we are thinking to ask random people in new steps to share their story with this place, or their final destination to rich our content and indicate the relationship between people and place.
After some weeks of discussion and have decided on the project’s foundational concepts, understanding and structuring its sonic possibilities and defining the respective tasks seems appropriate. To quickly sum up the foundations of this project, the project will be composed of an exhibition, where an immersive experience of a pre-captured space (with LiDAR) will be displaced that users will explore through interactive methods. Through this brief, and after careful thought, the collective can identify four main sound-work domains:
Soundscape Capturing
Place Sonification
Interactive Sound
Installation.
This is handy since the group comprises 4 Sound Design students, to whom these sound-work domains can be later assigned as roles.
Soundscape Capturing
The relationship between the concept of place and soundscape is crucial and interdependent. A place can be defined as a location with unique physical, cultural, and social characteristics. On the other hand, the soundscape refers to the acoustic environment that a person experiences in a particular place, including natural and human-made sounds. The soundscape contributes to our perception of a place, creating a sense of identity and atmosphere.
Capturing and reproducing the soundscape along with the place (through LiDAR) will play a critical role in shaping perception and understanding of the presented place. Therefore, it will probably be one of the first performed sound tasks for this project. The defined location of capture is sonically vibrant, having an urban profile sided with nature. It is composed of an extensive collection of elements that must be carefully thought out across all capture moments: planning, recording, and editing. This being said, through professional field-recording technology and carefully thought-out techniques, we propose to explore ways of best capturing this soundscape, having in mind its high-fidelity representation and the means of the entirety of the project along with its final form.
Place Sonification
One of the project’s core concepts to capture a location into point cloud data urges a new sound opportunity. A critical rule taught through the course and that here applies greatly: where there is audio, there is data, and where there is data, there can always be audio.
Grain River – Project that sonifies recorded GPS/Accelerometer data (Galego, 2021)
One aspect of sound art is data sonification, which involves transforming data into sound to make it more accessible and to enhance its representation. In data sonification, data points are mapped to specific sound parameters, such as pitch, frequency, and volume. This creates a sonic representation of the data that can reveal patterns, trends, and relationships in ways that might not be immediately apparent through visual means. Sound art that employs data sonification can range from immersive installations to interactive pieces and has the potential to offer new perspectives on data and provide a unique and engaging form of artistic expression.
This being said, point cloud data can be turned into quantifiable formats such as XYZ and RGB and exported into an xml. file. The resultant xml. file can be converted into txt. file and be fed to a Max/MSP patch that reads these numbers. From here, through computational sound composing, data will generate a meaningful sound-art piece that represents the recorded place. In a sense, letting the physical shape of the site perform a new soundscape. This method could also play along with the recorded soundscape audio, where this high-fidelity representation can be processed and re-shaped according to the point cloud data sets.
Interactive Sound
As stated previously, the user will perform some degree of interactivity with the exhibition. Users will interact through a control system that takes in a relatively simple gesture (stepping up or down). Although simple, this represents a decision-making process of the user, which on its terms, presents multiple sets of data:
outcome A
outcome B
similarity to a past outcome
dissimilarity to a past outcome
Such parameters can be represented by quantified data and be sonified through Max/MSP. Perhaps one other form of sonification would be to use unity/unreal for this purpose, which along with middleware like Wwise or Fmod, could work sound in exciting and varied ways. This task, however, will demand the crucial point of finding the optimal way to read live data from this simplistic control and manage a system that is optimal for such a purpose.
Installation
As stated previously, the final presented product of this project will be an exhibition, in the sense that it will use space to deliver an audio-visual product. This premise demands the installation factor for both Audio and Visual domains. Now, it is also clearly stated that the project proposes an immersive experience. On the one hand, this “immersive” label narrows down the installation options. On the other hand, it demands innovative and creative solutions.
Installation is the task that, for the most part, is thought out as the last step when it is not. It plays with various factors that must be planned, measured, tested and improved. It accounts for the type of audio to playback, the space being used, and most importantly, the listener, both as an individual and the audience. The installation must be thought out early in the project and improved along the project developments and must account for all the different needs that might occur over time.
Two possible solutions come to mind for the “immersive exhibition” concern of the project: a multichannel surround sound speaker set-up or an ambisonic solution with a binaural format. However, although ambisonics provides powerful ways to create immersive experiences, it also demands more resources and would not offer a simple solution for the different possible orientations of the listener. Therefore, a multichannel surround sound system seems more appropriate as this can more easily be adapted and tuned to the ongoing project’s needs.
As a group, we decided that in order to narrow down our final idea that it would be useful for all team members to come up with how they could see this project unfolding. We had agreed in a previous meeting that the physical presentation of this project is going to be in the form of an installation/exhibition – a space (i.e place!) that the user can explore and be immersed in.
I’ll get into the specifics of my idea in a moment; first I want to show what inspired it. In Portsmouth, they have a series of installations as a part of We Shine Portsmouth where artists display their exhibitions around the city. In 2021, British artists Anna Heinrich and Leon Palmer used 3D laser scanning technology, a voile screen, projected film, sound and lighting effects, an installation was created that could be folded down and moved to another location, like a mythical vessel.
The way that they projected this on such a scale was really interesting. The movement of the ship, the surround sound and the lighting come together to create an engaging experience.
My Idea
So – how do I envision this project? During our first group brainstorm, one idea that was mentioned was experiencing and scanning a the same place at different times of the day/over multiple days. I loved this concept and thought that the vast array of skills this group has, that this has the potential to be incredibly immersive.
Where?
The News Steps that go from the top of the Royal Mile down to Waverley station almost broke me when I walked up them with a very heavy rucksack one day – so logically, I would like to spend the whole day running up and down taking LiDAR scans.
Photo by Molly Munro
These are a winding set of steps in the heart of the city, broken up by consistent landings where visitors can often be seen catching their breath. These landings could also be very useful for placing the LiDAR scanner on.
Something to keep in mind is that it can get busy, and it is a very expensive set of equipment – are there risk assessments needed? Do one of us stand guard in a hi-vis jacket?
When?
As I am wanting to capture the passing of time, scans and field recordings would be taken periodically throughout the day, possibly even over two days as it would be interesting to capture the “changing of the day”. Either way, I would record minimum over 24 hours, from early morning to late at night (12am-11pm?) take it in shifts to record this OR on multiple days and splice it together as if it were one.
What?
What is this going to look like as an instillation? I envision this having 3 rear projection screens surrounding the user. Front view: POV facing up the stairs; Side views: LiDAR split down the middle, left and right respectively.
Paper prototype visualisationPOV of user – 1POV of user – 2
In front of the user, near the centre of the three screens, would be the interactive control that allows for moving forward or backward in time. As time moves forward, the images change accordingly to the scans at that time while simultaneously moving up the stairs. As time goes backwards, it reverses.
Accompanying the images of the scans, there is lighting in the room that reflects the lighting at the time of day – sunrise, midday, sunset etc. There would also be a couple of speakers in the corners that are outputting the sounds recorded.
It could also be really interesting to have a button that transforms the ‘normal’ place into a distorted reality of sorts – into a ‘non-place’ where we have edited the LiDAR scans, morphed, twisted, warped them. Colours and sounds change to the opposites etc like being transported into a twilight zone.
