Catherine McCurry

Paths is an immersive 3D sound sculpture that a viewer performs by moving their body through space. The physical manifestation of the piece is an empty space inhabited by a distracted, and slowly wandering participant.  A white line along the floor suggests a possible navigation of the sculpture.

By navigating the sculpture, the viewer encounters a spatialized sonic landscape that is mapped to their physical location using a Kinect 3D camera and custom software written in openFrameworks. The combination of sounds at any spot in the sculpture is unique, as is every trip through it.

Parallel Cities/Pavilion of the past is a proposed, interactive sound installation situated in Flushing Meadows Corona Park. It addresses the history of New York City through an aural abstraction of the history of Flushing Meadows.

Site History:

Until about 15,000 years ago, New York was covered by a 1000 foot thick glacier that extended over much of Northeast America. When it receded, the top earth material was scraped away leaving a terminal moraine, composed of 500 million year old bed rock. The negative space of the ice sheet became the contour of the land New York is built upon.

People have lived on this land off and on for the last 8,000 years. The Lenape, or Delaware Indians lived here. The Dutch colonized it and called it New Amsterdam. The English took it and called it New York. Since the Dutch came, New York has been a trading post, a commercial zone, a hub of industry.

In the early 1900s, the Corona Ash Dump covered the tidal marsh area that would become the park. Ash produced by coal burning furnaces in the city was dumped here daily. In the Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald describes “Mt. Corona”, as it was known, as a symbol of industrial society’s decay and waste produced by the rich.

“This is the valley of ashes, a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the form of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.”  - F. Scott Fitzgerald

The ash dump was a ghost city made of ephemeral structures, reshaped daily by the furnaces that powered the lifestyle of industrial New York.

In 1936, the Corona Ash Dump was flattened into a 5km2 park that would be the site of the 1939-1940 World’s Fair. The fair was comprised of extraordinary, experimental, temporary architecture. It presented the “World of Tomorrow” – a utopian future city comprised of technological marvels.

The fair ended in financial disaster because of poor accounting, and the eruption of WWII, and the temporary city was dismantled.

In 1964, the park became the site of another World’s Fair.

The fair was a showcase of mid-20th century American culture and technology. At the center of the park stands the fair’s symbol of “Man’s Achievements on a Shrinking Globe in an Expanding Universe” – the Unisphere, depicting our earth of “The Space Age”. Temporary pavilions housed international and corporate displays, contained idealized presentations of modern technologies and international relations. Walt Disney’s animatronic exhibit “It’s a Small World” debuted here.

The ’64 World’s Fair also ended in financial disaster, and the structures were dismantled, save two: the Unisphere and the New York State Pavilion. The skeleton of the tent of tomorrow and observation towers can still be seen today, a fossil of a temporary city.

Parallel Cities:

Flushing Meadows is a space that evolves in parallel to New York City. Temporary structures that inhabit it are imprints of New York/industrial/modern life.

Impetus:

The life that molds this parallel city is embedded in the land itself as audible material.

Project Proposal:

Parallel Cities/Pavilion of the Past presents itself as a structure that is integrated with the landscape of the park. It is part pavilion, in the tradition of the World’s Fairs, and part archaeological excavation.

It is a cave which is ambiguously man-made or discovered, made of earth that is ‘radio’-active.

The floor is earth, and slopes down from the entrance to the opposite end of the cave. The interior walls are made of porous fiberglass fashioned to look like a cave interior. Speakers are concealed within the walls, invisible to the viewer. The lighting is natural, and the sonic environment is delicate.

Localized speakers in the walls, floor and ceiling contain specific audio/historic memories for the audience to discover as they explore the space. Audio artifacts come in and out of focus with time and position in the room.

Here is a simulation of a tour around the space:

Parallel Cities/Pavilion of the Past Tour

There is a constant ambient sound of burning coal mixed with the pops of vinyl and cassette tapes – artifacts of ‘radio’-active decay.

The low hum is the sound of singing glaciers, pitched up to be perceptible to human ears.

Original audio from the ’39 and ’64 World’s Fairs is presented next to sound processed with musical elements from specific time periods. Convolution is used to blend between time periods.

Each speaker has a dedicated mp3 player and audio loop. The players are either powered by batteries which are changed daily, or by lines from existing structures in the park. The Audio is soft, inviting viewers to get close to the walls in order to make out details in what they are hearing.

For the score assignment, I designed an instrument using the Kinect and OpenFrameworks. I arranged several sounds in a 3D space, conceptual mountains of sound. The volume of each sound is governed by the position of a performer within the space. The pan of each sound is controlled by the performer’s level (crouching and standing will cause the sound to move from left to right and back again).

I then designed a score, in the form of a path along the floor that a performer would walk along in order to perform the piece from mesh fabric strips. At every knot/bow in the score, the performer should crouch. At the end of the path, the performer should slowly back off of the mat.

The sonic content will probably change in the future. I will also probably tweak it so that the performer being too close, or accidentally exiting the sensing range of the Kinect will not cause the sound to cut out abruptly.

What is the effect of increased distance in time on sound?

Teleportal is a proposed sound installation. The installation would take place in a large, acoustically divided room separated by a windowed wall.

On one side of the wall, a metronome keeps time. People are invited to explore this side. A microphone records this room, and the audio is recorded to a buffer the length of the installation.

Speakers in the other room broadcast audio from the miked room. There is an interface which allows participants to travel through time, acoustically

This project is an exploration of the effect of increased distance in time on sound. I’m drawing an analogy between radioactive decay and radio decay (sound decay)

The effect of increased distance in time reflects the way recordings in the real world decay (physical recording interfaces decay producing vinyl/cassette hiss, digital aliasing).

It also reflects the way real events decay in our collective memories (linearity is replaced by sentiment.

With enough distance from the present, sound is indistinguishable from vinyl static/ash/wind.

Implimentation:

I am creating a patch in Max/MSP that records audio from miked room to a long buffer. The patch also contains a granular synthesizer, and a sound player that plays a prepared loop of vinyl static and ash.

The participant specifies the amount of time relative to the present they would like to listen to, and this is used as a parameter which controls the length, overlap, density, and dilation of the granules. It also controls the mix between the audio from the room, and the prepared static.

Demonstrations:

1 second ago: sound is linear, almost indistinguishable from sound of the present - 1second

2 minutes ago: long granules overlap, close to linear arrangement - 2minutes

1 hour ago: shorter granules, more overlap, static mix creeps in - 1hour

2 days ago: short, jumbled, faint granules, static mix begins to dominate - 2days

8 days ago: metronome recognizable, static takes over – 8days

2 months ago: static is all that remains – 2months

Even though I had a terrible time going there last week, I decided to stick with the observation towers in Flushing Meadows. I composed a soundwalk  following I took when I was there. And those I could have taken, had it been a different time.

tripod.worldsfair.soundwalk

I took an approach to the sound walk that is somewhere between Janet Cardiff and Tarkovsky. This place interests me. This place that is such a landmark, so visible and identifiable, and yet so purposeless. What are those weird futurist towers in the distance. What are they for?  What did they do and why have they been allowed to stand only to decay. Why were they saved in the first place. Should they be allowed to return to the ash heap they came from.

I’m interested in the history of this place and the ghosts that inhabit it. It is not an interesting place in and of itself, which is why I did my walk through a blending of times.

Following a burst of integrity, I trekked all the way out to Flushing Meadows Corona park. I froze my feet off, walked many an uncleared path, fell on my behind repeatedly carrying most of my electronic worldly possessions – all to bring you the following images and sound recording. It was a pretty ghostly time to be there – there were no other people. It’s in the middle of a large park, and you can hear the sounds of the city and civilization through a sort of mesh. During my deep listening, I had the feeling that I was in a cocoon, insulated from the outside world.

Audio Recording: flushingmeadows,unisphere,tripod

Words:

Drawing: (is kind of out of focus, but I have no real sketching skills)