Spatial Design

What is the general scope of ideas?
I would like to explore the ways in which people perceive and respond to sound. It's been proposed that even self-acknowledged "tone deaf" people will react negatively to dissonance and positively to consonance, due to either the hierarchal structure of a tonal piece (studies have shown) or the spatial relationships between frequencies and their proximity to each other in accordance with the basic harmonic principles of the overtone series (according to Arnold Schoenberg, among others). These musical concepts can be applied to any number of spatial or psychological relationships: comfort vs. anxiety, right vs. wrong, familiarity vs. the unknown, clarity vs. incoherence, etc. Furthermore, by combining concepts like spatial relationships, musical relationships and kinetic relationships this project also touches on Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligence, wherein he states that visual-spatial, body-kinesthetic and auditory-musical intelligence are the three types of Sensational learning. While this theory is controversial, it should also be pointed out that many studies conducted on normal, neuro-surgical and brain-damaged individuals have concluded that the right cerebral hemisphere of the brain is dominant in the identification and perception of musical stimuli, non-verbal sounds and the analysis of geomoetric and physical space.

What parts of the general scope are specifically covered by your project?
My project approaches the idea of a spatial-kinetic-musical correlation by placing the user in a situation where he or she can control an auditory stimulus through bodily kinetic movement through a spatial design. The auditory stimulus changes to reflect the user's relative position, either to other users, a pre-determined path, objects in the room or the arrangement of objects in a room. The user can interpret this stimulus as either negative or positive feedback and determine his or her next move accordingly.

Introducing the project:
My intent is for the user to determine spatial relationships in sound and be able to control them through kinetic activity. The interaction among different wave frequencies is in fact a spatial relationship, but it is invisible to the eye and difficult for the imagination. People who are not musically trained are often intimidated by the prospect of controlling and organizing sounds without realizing that they already possess the basic tools necessary for understanding musical organization. By relating such organization to simple concepts like familiarity and the unknown, or proximity and distance, even the most un-musically inclined can begin to see musical organization simply as a series of tension and release, consonance and dissonance, stability and instability. It is when these concepts combine that music is created.

This project would be designed especially for the ITP Winter show, where a large number of potential users will be available. What is most exciting is that it can take up as little or as much space as desired and can be accomplished in any number of ways. At this stage, it is highly adaptable and could be modified to work in conjunction with another student piece, possibly even with all of the students' pieces!

That being said, I'd like to talk first about how I think the project could be best utilized, and go from there. I would love to use this project as a tool to help other students show their artwork by guiding the users to it, using the auditory-kinetic-spatial relationship described above. If we approach the users as a network, we could possibly even control the flow of people in the show, sending each user on a different course, relocating them to a piece that hasn't been looked at or moving them to a less crowded area of the room, all through the auditory stimuli they receive through their headphones. In fact, if the works displayed at the Winter Show were used as nodes on a sonic labyrinth, each work that is on display could have its own auditory stimulus, completely customizable for each student. Not only would this bring a sense of unity to the show by connecting all the students' work, but it would require no designated space, other than the space that is already being taken up by the people who are visiting.

But, again, this piece could easily be adapted to work in conjunction with another class project. for example, this could be accomplished through some tangible display, such as Alex's mechanical pixels, which, when arranged by the user, produces sounds that are comparable to the coherence of the image produced. This could even be approached as a type of puzzle which the user can be guided, either by sound or sight or both, to solve. This is just one alternate idea, but I'm sure there are more.

What resources are needed for this project?
To carry this out, I would need an ample supply of headphones, which I imagine I could scrounge up through the ER. As far as how the sounds will be received by the users, we could use anything from shortwave radios or walkie-talkies, to the users' personal cell phones. By passing out sensors or inserting them in one of the devices we supply the users with, we can track how close they are to any one piece on the floor.