Conceptual update

Last week I’ve started to read The Great Animal Orchestra by: Bernie Krause, and it reinforced me with new knowledge about natural soundscapes and the source of musical inspiration for modern societies. Bioacoustics are also a strong indicator for analyzing the overall health of a particular ecosystem through spectrograms. Krause explains that with his experience of recording a soundscape in a forest before and after people interfered and cut trees. Through a spectrogram it is clearly visible that there is less birds in the ecosystem as they have nowhere to nest anymore.

“While a picture may be worth a thousand words, a soundscape is worth a thousand pictures.” Bernie Krause

In the book he defines three different elements of a soundscape: geophony, biophony and anthropophony. Natural sounds that spring from nonbiological subcategories like wind, water and rain are considered geophony and they have a direct effect on individual voice expressions of animals. Biophony is the collective sounds of vocalising animals and insects which fill the natural soundscapes in different frequency ranges adapted to the geophony sounds. Anthropophony is the sound made by human and human made objects that are rapidly increasing in urban environments. This distinction has helped me to approach listening from a different perspective, analyzing bioacoustic soundscapes and applying that in my abstracted imitations of specific sounds that I would like to use in the installations experience.

His description of animal ear structures, which are mostly capable of moving their ears in various directions and locating the source of the sound made my think of a device that would serve as an ear wearable for human to mimic an auditory system of a cat for example. I believe this idea has a deep connection to my thesis’s question and I am looking forward to develop a prototype and consider it a part of the final product.

I’ve looked for people that are working in the same field as Krause and I’ve came across R. Murray Schafer. He is a Canadian composer and environmentalist who is concerned about acoustic ecology. In 1977 he wrote a book Tuning of the World and I am looking forward to dive into it and extend my research related to my thesis project.

Technical update

Eventually, I would like to have the installation’s experience linked to a website where the soundscape would be outputted and accessible from any place with the internet connection. I’ve successfully created a web client that is subscribed to an MQTT topic and is displaying the sensor messages received by an arduino or ESP32 in an HTML element. I’m really happy about that because it can be used for the NIME project as well.

Thanks to my friend Luka Staničić, who has a masters in robotics I’ve been able to solder a circuit that includes TPI LiPo rechargeable battery, DC-DC converter and charging module with micro USB. Now the MQTT architecture really makes sense as I can be controlling Ableton’s parameters wirelessly from different locations.

User Testing

For user testing I’ve met with a friend Lucija, who has been working as a photographer and a designer in the past years. Her portfolio can be accessed through a website. I have showed her my working prototype of the device and how it works as a MIDI controller in ableton to control parameters. Later we have discussed my current conceptual state of the project and she has proposed to me to keep a focus on developing a creative platform that would use sensor data as MIDI to create new interactions for musical expressions. In her opinion the conceptual part of the project doesn’t seem so important as the experience wouldn’t allow users to express themselves freely, instead it would be bounded by a specific ecosystem soundscape. Anyways she gave me great feedback on user journey and I really like her idea of having some positive interactions that would add sounds as well as negative interactions that would remove sounds in the space. This concept would make participants question how different interactions affect the environment and space in which the installation is present.