Our general
awareness of spatiality is strongly dependent on the omnidirectional and
non-selective reception of our hearing. While the eyes are conditioned for
complex rendering of objects and their characteristics, the hearing primarily
follows continuity in time and space. Therefore the ears detect with great
accuracy the slightest changes in speed, direction, distance and voluminous
proportions between ourselves and the environment. More than any of the senses,
the specificity of hearing is vital to experience spatiality.
In early
Renaissance paintings, perspective itself, or a fascination of the possibility
to represent perspective, is often the central theme of the image. In
reconstructing the natural deviation of angles that follows from the limited
curve of the retina, painters were able to suggest a dimension of the visual
experience vital to everyday perception. Reconstructing spatial perspectives
for the ears means expanding the image to a full panoramic scope, as the ears
do not cancel out angles but always discern space omnidirectional. And similar
to the movement of a camera in film, we do not only perceive a surrounding from
a still point of view, but we also move ourselves through this space and
therewith change the scope of our perspective.
When I started
with 4D Sound I was always imagining the space as a surrounding where external
entities and energies where present and moving. While developing and
discovering 4D Sound further, I became more and more interested in the interior
experience of space, the way we position our body and therewith create
perspectives of spatiality.
Such interior
experience of space are based on elementary motions of the body like moving
forward and backward, turning around, moving up, falling down and being still.
These physical motions gain yet another dimension when their extremes are being
tweaked. One can think of moving forward at rocket speed, or falling down for
kilometers with increasing speed and so on. Also, more delicate physical
experiences can be imagined such as experiences of dizziness, shivering,
shaking or scatter. In other words, affections that come from within the body
and blur the totality of the spatial perception.
With this idea
we developed the ‘global transform’ module for 4D Sound. It is basically the
reconstruction of a virtual listener in space. Global transformations makes all
the sounds in space move proportional to the direction and position of a
virtual listeners body. This virtual listener in a way replaces the actual
listening position of each individual listener in space, makes believe that we
experience the world from this perspective.
When moving on
the highway or in a train, the perspective of the surrounding landscape
transforms proportional to the speed we move with. the closer the object, the
faster it moves past us. spatial distances become rhythmic speeds upon a basic
tempo that is the speed we virtually move in. When rotating around, all sound
globally receive a position within the rotation. Static sounds rotate
proportional around the virtual listener. Straight moving sounds become
spirals, Rotating sounds are
either accelerated or diminished by their direction of movement. One can
imagine rotations to achieve very high speeds and become tones, forming
harmonic relations with each, like revolving sounding bodies.
The perspective
of spatial listening gains yet another surreal highlight when the size of a
space is globally transformed. A sounding space can diminish to the size of a
grain of sand, and then expand again to cosmic proportions. By continually
expanding the size of a virtual space, sounds can continue to evolve from
within a Pandora’s box, ever-expanding illusions of a sound captured within a
sound within a sound.
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