Audible Geology: Deep Time Soundscapes (2014)
Interested in the relationship between sound and image, this project was inspired by why we have so many panoramic postcard views of the Grand Canyon, but very little representing its sounds. During three weeks as an artist in residence at the Grand Canyon autonomous field recorders were placed at various locations along the south rim to create an audio surveillance database. From these raw materials a series of interactive and multi-channel sound works were produced.
The sound shower section of the installation is an 8-channel audiovisual interactive piece. There are four speakers overhead and four at the waist, the listener steps into the center and chooses between 6 different ‘sound showers’. Each one has an accompanying visualization showing the path of the sound as it moves around the body.
For one of the pieces, the same thunderbolt is heard from three different height elevations in the canyon (the bottom, middle and near the top), this sound is cycled around the listener like a clock hand moving clockwise, with the recording from the top of the rim playing above the head, the middle recording in both high and low speakers (at 50% volume) and the lowest speakers play the recordings from the bottom of the canyon. The listener is put in a surreal sonic head space of hearing from multiple drastically different height elevations at the same time.
