This is a mix-down of a trial run of the work I performed as my assessment piece for Spatial and Sonic Environments. I had a lot of trouble with Audiomulch crashing repeatedly on account of the complexity of simultaneous processing I was demanding of it. Despite this I was determined not to simply play a recording of the piece as it's not really a "piece" at all. It is an environment for sound without specific duration or even form: it is more an imaginary space than a "thing". An advantage of having the work performative in nature is that it prevents too much reification of the work as "a work". It is more a place where things happen than the results of a happening.
As a major concern this year has been with transport, passages, in-between states and ways in which the relation of "here" and "there" can be taken as something like a primary "choreography" of experience I really wanted to "perform the space" that I had set up, even though this "space" was a virtual one.
The reason I decided to use Audiomulch was because of its "metasurface" which places "snapshots" of the state of a process in an X/Y axis (I use the corners of the rectangle by default but other arragements are also possible). This virtual space is a kind of map of the sonic possibilities of a particular arrangement of processes. I used it in the live performance to control things like the rate at which the granulators sample and replay short fragments of the field recordings being fed into them. I also used it to control and interact with the filtering and delay times of the processing applied to the sounds of currawongs and bats. In addition it engineered cross fades between the various sonic levels of the environment I had set up.
As a rectangular virtual space the metasurface acted as well as a kind of metaphor for the real space I was attempting to evoke and transform in the work. A lot of the original field recordings I made featured the sounds of walking to and from the small digital recorder I used, as well as the sounds of my footsteps on gravel and dirt. Quite pleasingly the sounds that indicate my presence in the recorded sound-field, when accelerated, had the same sonic quality (whispering, rustling) as the sounds of bat wings in one of the files being fed into the live processing: one (human) form of movement rhymed audibly with another (non-human) form of movement and both were present in the soundworld of the work.
This isn't identical to the performed work, given the degree of complexity of the processing it appears almost impossible to repeat the same movements twice.
And that is the point of doing the thing live I guess.
The metasurface is the coloured rectangle and the white lines are interpolating between four different settings of the process. The four settings are audible alone in the four corners only so any other place in the metasurface results in a setting influenced by all four settings but to different degrees depending on the position of the cursor. The cursor is controlled by a finger on the trackpad of the laptop (or a mouse if used) and apears highly sensitive to the slightest alterations of position. The metasurface is a kind of map and is further mapped onto the trackpad of the laptop: I conceived of the metasurface as a kind of map of the "real" space as well in that it was a domain in which one could wander.
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