Son[i]a #155
Arthur Sauer about Wave Field Synthesis
Co-founded by artist and composer Arthur Sauer and researcher Erwin Roebroeks, The Game of Life is the world’s only mobile Wave Field Synthesis system. Wave Field Synthesis is a spatial audio rendering technique for the creation of virtual acoustic environments.
It produces ‘artificial’ wave fronts synthesized by numerous individually-driven speakers. These wave fronts seem to originate from a virtual starting point: the virtual or notional source. Contrary to traditional specialization techniques such as stereo, the localization of virtual sources in WFS does not depend on – or change with – the listener’s position.
The Game of Life Foundation facilitates the creation, production, programming and promotion of cutting-edge spatial sound projects. Coinciding with Sónar festival, the system, with its 192 specially designed loudspeakers, is one of the projects featured in “Oferta Pública / Public Tender”: Rita McBride’s solo show at MACBA.
SSON[I]A talks to Arthur Sauer about immersive sound, spatial electronic music, and other applications of Wave Field Synthesis.
Auxiliaries
In PROBES #37.2, Chris Cutler opens a conversation with crooners, experimental artists, and rock legends in order to exchange notes at their EA (Electricionists Anonymous) meeting on their mutual dependency on microphones and loudspeakers (feedback welcome).
In PROBES #37, we consider the revolution ushered in by the thermionic valve and, in particular, the disorienting but transformative changes electrical amplification brought into a world until then predicated solely on acoustical laws. We then examine the cybernetic entanglement of its mirrored portals (the microphone and the loudspeaker) through the generative instability of feedback which, it turns out, has accessible expressive powers...
Ji Youn Kang
Ji Youn Kang’s abstract compositions are infused with her personal blend of Western experimental sound and Korean ritual music. This hybrid background also seeps into her live performances, where she explores the primitive and empowering rhythmic structures of Korean shamanism –often building up from slow to fast– and noisy sound through an amalgam of handmade analogue devices, acoustic instruments, and digital signal processing techniques. In this podcast, Ji talks about Korean ritual music, perfect 5ths and nature, resonating objects, noise, self-built instruments, uncertainty and tension, Wave Field Synthesis, and strategies to engage online audiences in meaningful communication.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with sound artist Ji Youn Kang that we were unable to include the first time around.
John Chowning
John Chowning shares the experience of being a pioneer in a discipline at a time when using computers to generate music was a leap into the void between creative eccentricity and scientific adventure.
Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller