Soundscape

From micro-chips implanted at the base of our spines to full on cyborgs, we anticipate technological advancements that will allow us to augment the human body. However, we already have our senses and abilities regularly augmented by technology. Through this soundscape we explore how an object as commonplace as headphones can significantly augment how we experience sound.

Untitled, 2021 / Audio recording, 2:00 / by Maya Williams and Ding Wenxiao ---------- For best experience listen with headphones

Initially, the idea behind this project was to play with our sense of sound as spatial. I came to this idea after listening to a recording of a cricket I collected with a Zoom recorder. Initially, I had the stereo mic of the Zoom pointed directly at a cricket I came across at the subway station. In the recording you can tell when I turned slowly away from it, because you can hear the sound of the cricket’s chirp shift from your right ear to your left ear in the headphones. I noticed this at the moment but became particularly interested in it when I was listening back later, realizing that with technology it is possible to exert more control over how sound is directed into my body. When engaging in passive listening we experience all the sounds around us as one mixture of noises. If we tune in a bit more we can locate the direction of some of our environmental soundscape but the busier an auditory space is the harder this becomes. By utilizing pan editing and both mono and stereo recordings we created an experience that directs sound along an axis. When experienced with headphones I have a distinct sense of my left and right ears as individual entities. This increased awareness of body feels referential to the act of taking a hand mirror to look at somewhere intimate. For me, it almost startles my sense of form. Playing the audio from a laptop still facilitates some of the directionality of the soundscape, but headphones yield the best results. Ultimately the soundscape became more an experimentation with my sense of how technology can augment the body by bringing hyperawareness to things we often don’t engage in organically. In order to re-approach the exploration of sound as spatial, I’d be interested in editing something for a multi-speaker space and attempting to mimic the sense of directionality-- especially the moving away and coming together of sounds--I get from listening to this piece with headphones.

You can check out Ding’s blog here.