(in collaboration with N.B. Aldrich)

Appropriate Response is a generative audio installation that creates a dynamic conversation between three television sets. It was created during a residency at ISEA 2008 in Singapore.

Using sound clips harvested from local broadcasts, the televisions act as individuals engaged in an ongoing topical debate. Each individual shares a basic set of procedural rules and a 'cultural database' of clips from which to derive responses. They also develop ‘personalities’ to guide specific choices. Evolving over the course of the exhibition, new sound clips are gathered and old ones ‘forgotten’.

This artwork comments on the cut-and-paste ethic, derived from new media, that has arisen in contemporary culture. It often seems a “logic of selection” (Lev Manovich) is employed in which the juxtaposition of existing information fragments has become an accepted form of constructing an argument, without the need for synthesis or a cumulative rationale.

This piece asks: Is it appropriate to simply appropriate a response?

In Singapore, the installation monitored the nightly news from TV Channel 5 (MediaCorp) to create its database of audio clips. Every night it automatically extracted several clips from the newscast and tagged them via speech-recognition. The next day, the television individuals could use the new clips as they searched the cultural database for relevant responses to eachother's speech. Their conversation reflected current events such as the build-up to the Beijing Olympics, a political scandal in nearby Malaysia, or the shooting of a South Korean tourist.

Click the screenshot below to play a 5 minute "conversation" from Singapore.
(Quicktime H.264 stream, 15 MB)

Photos from the ISEA 2008 Juried Exhibition, National Museum, Singapore. (Summer 2008)

Hi-Res Images for publication. (opens a new window)

(in collaboration with N.B. Aldrich)

The Aural Ecosystem applies the generative structures of nature to audio synthesis, creating an 'ecosystem' that develops over time. Synthesizers created from 'genetic' code undergo lifecycles in a multi-speaker 'habitat' with both individual and community characteristics evolving based on peer-to-peer relationships and environmental stimuli.

Up to 24 speaker/sculptures form housings for individual 'critters' who call out to find potential mates. Ambient light helps provide each individual with stimulus to be more or less robust within the context of a variety of internal (individual) and external (environmental) conditions.

Over time, individuals can 'breed' with others who share similar characteristics, spawning offspring that combine elements of their parents. Through this process, an emerging 'ecology' is generated that has its own system of varietal successes and failures, its own population oscillations - in short, its own 'nature'.

Aural Ecosystem premiered in the SOUNDMARKS exhibition at Art Interactive in Cambridge, MA from June 8 to August 18th 2007.

Photos from the SOUNDMARKS exhibit at Art Interactive, Cambridge, MA (Summer 2007)

RECORDINGS from the exhibition space (recorded several hours apart):

• Variety (2MB MP3, 2min)
  In this sample, several distinct sounds have emerged. Gurgling, whining, and hissing sounds oscillate across the space.


• Noisy Close-up (1.5MB MP3, 1.5min)
  A "close-up" recording of one voice, which contributes occasional gurgles as its neighbors ebb and flow.


• Buzzy Close-up (2MB MP3, 2min)
  A buzzy tone from one voice joins multiple pitched whines and a bed of distant rumbles from the other side of the space.

The Observational Soundscape

The Observational Soundscape is a series of sound installations developed by nbaldrich and myself. In terms of this work, observe means both to sense through careful attention and to celebrate through practice. Each installation is designed to be spontaneous audio accompaniment for an accessible place and is not intended for private or paid-admission spaces. Each installation will be adapted to the chosen site. So far we have installed it at the University of Maine, Cooper Union in NYC, and Bates College in Maine.

Using a video camera and microphones, our custom computer software converts the activity of a space into a continually changing soundscape whose form and content reflect the visual and aural phenomena observed in the area. Every detected change in the physical space impacts the piece in some way: sometimes generating audio material and sometimes creating structural variation.

The software translates the trends of color, density and motion from the video camera into the timing, pitch, and spatial characteristics of an audio environment. In some versions of the installation there are microphones which allow ambient sounds to become part of the material used by the instrument. The result is broadcast through 4 speakers in the space.

The Observational Soundscape I: Orono

Memorial Union, University of Maine

The first version was installed at the University of Maine at Orono in May 2005. The atrium of the Memorial Union bloomed with sound as people passed through the installation area while a computer screen showed a visualization of the movement sensed by the piece. Read the campus press release. We are grateful for the support of the Maine Arts Commission in the construction of this piece.

The Observational Soundscape II: Cooper

Cooper Union School of Art, NYC

The second version was installed in a sunlit hallway at the Cooper Union School of Art in NYC in September 2005. This version was much more sensitive to the colors of moving objects and it featured a different visual display which showed the cumulative color trails of all of the people who walked through the space. These trails were constantly analyzed to create long-term variation in the soundscape itself. This version was sensitive enough to react to the occasional rays of sun projected on the floor, responding with quiet unexpected compositions.

Click the thumbnails to play Quicktime movies from Cooper and earlier tests.

The Observational Soundscape III: Bates

Olin Arts Center, Bates College

The third version of the installation was part of an exhibition called Activator at the Olin Arts Center, Bates College Maine. We rebuilt the synthesis engine to incorporate the aural history of the space (in much the same way that the color trails of the previous version recorded visual history). Whenever nearby sounds reached a certain threshold they were recorded into a digital archive where they stayed for up to seven days. When the camera saw movement, the software picked a sound from the archive and subjected it to processing and spatialization based on the color and density of the motion. The color of the current object was compared to the historical average to determine which sound was picked. Colors that broke the continuity of their surroundings triggered sounds from farther back in time, mirroring visual discontinuities with temporal ones.

Click the thumbnails to play Quicktime movies from the Bates installation.

Hi-Res Images for publication. (opens a new window)