SoundPrintsby Aqeel Akbar

Pin Lane

Introduction

Process One

Pin Lane’s recorded history can be dated as far as back as 1747, while this street might seem empty and defined as a back lane, there is a lot of history hidden within it’s stones. The cobblestones have recorded and show the very history of Pin Lane. As people go by, the seagulls cry, the pigeons coo, and cars roar by, they leave a noisy footprint, sending re-verberations across the surface of Pin Lane. Whilst the greatest noise producer is by man, however, nature is still much a part of this man made stony lane. The birds heavily domi-nate the sunrise of this lane and their piercing cries are known are very much audible and noticeable, to the point it is almost in some warped and eclectic way it is actually music and this echos through the lane, despite the schizophrenic nature of the lane. You can even hear the wind rush through the lane if you listen carefully. The beauty of the lane is, wherever you may be in Pin Lane, you do get to hear everything.

In a similar way, VJ artists tells the story of music through imagery, videos, animations and light effects, i.e. sound visualisations, my approach to the space is to exhibit this ghostly, piercing sound prints of the birds of Pin Lane. I want to demonstrate the sound brought to Pin Lane through means of visual imagery and show the musical element to this noise produced by nature. ->

As Pin Lane was presented, there was very little known about the Lane itself. What was it func-tion? Does it house any important sites? buildings? What’s it famous for? Has it ever appeared in the news or had a public profile of some form? So my first step was to investigate this and find any history associated with Pin Lane. I started this by going through the history of the local town hall and see if I could associate anything with Pin Lane. We records of ownership in this lane. It was interesting to find this out but felt a bit deflated as we had very little evidence of the history of Pin Lane. It got me thinking this must not be the only way we can record history. So I started to look at how we record history, or rather what is a more natural way of looking at history. One of the key examples was stone and rocks - for example city walls dating back to the Roman Empire can be found in St. Albans. From these walls, one is able to find out what kind of city St. Albans was, it’s size, and what sort of army was stationed thereby giving an idea the number of people in that city. Upon observation of Pin Lane, I realised Pin Lane had a cobbled road, and that meant it wouldn’t replacing after a long time and I realised this is historically huge. As it’s witnessed the both world wars, the change in Plymouth, the change in people and the change in the barbican. In some ways, I considered it being the best evidence of history. So through this natural history, I wanted to show that these stones are in actual fact recording a lot of informa-tion with respect to what is going on in the Lane.

The next step was to investigate what exactly do the stones witness? I started by doing a near 24 hour camp out onsite, observing and noting down notes based on the activities of the ac-tual lane. I noticed that so much was happening and the only real witness were the rocks. As evidence I took time lapse shots by means of a camera. I used a Nikon D90 and linked it to my laptop and used an application called Sofortbild and iStopMotion. From this I was able to do a timelapse shot of sunset on Pin Lane. I used one particular wall as my focus as I found it interest-ing it has must be windows that are now closed up. I did it face on as I wanted to capture the mood or rather the atmosphere of the actual wall face on. I also took a walk along the lane and took pictures of all the stones looking down onto the cobbled stone.

Process TwoMy birdwatching observations came back very interesting. I found sunrise the amount of noise generated by the birds was quite high. I used a decibal meter to even the record the findings and was quite amused as to how the residents surrounding Pin Lane coped with the noise set by the birds. I observed this from either end of the lane and realised that no matter where you should the sound was very schrill and the echos were very dominant as well. I realised I wanted to highlight this in my visualisation, and come up with something quite extreme and dominant. In the evenings, the people made the most of the noise and I felt it was industrial in this sense... and the noise of the birds was not at all dominant. So I decided to stick with sunrise and come up with an effective but simple visualisation of the birds cry, and I also wanted to show the musical element of the cry.

The photos I took, I started to manipulating them and placing them together to form a panoramic shot or a long mural. I noticed the gaps between the stones formed a line and so I started drawing in lines in between the stones and as I was doing this, I felt it was quite po-etic as if the life lines or history lines have been naturally placed between the stones. Granted they positions of the stone were made by man, however the natural jaggedness felt quite interesting. As I started sketching and photoshopping photos in the hope of getting some inspiration. However I was feeling a little uninspired with the lifelines, so I decided to go back to Pin Lane and quite literally immerse myself in the background. As I watched, the cars and people were generating quite a noise which could be heard from either end of the lane, despite it’s schizophrenic nature. However, what did catch my attention was the cry of the seagulls and the coo of the pigeons, it seemed a bit silly at first but I listened to them more it became a bit of eery but ghostly noise and in some respect in some weird warped way, almost musical. The piercing cries resonate through the lane and it felt the echos are quite dominant. So with this interesting lead, I decided to spend a couple of hours per day over a period of weeks at different times of the day, noting and observing the natural sounds in Pin Lane. In some respects, I felt like I had become a bird watcher. I observed sunrise, breakfast, midday, mid afternoon, evening rush hour, sunset and night time.

I then started looking at ways sound could be depicted through imagery. One such an exam-ple that I produced for Glastonbury 2009. It’s a live camera feed that shows 3D topography of the live feed, and then the spikes would occur according to the sound. This piece was inspired by Radiohead’s Lidar Music Video used for their song “House of Cards”. This got me thinking about how I could incorporate this into my model. The key thing that I would need to make sure is I don’t want just one microphone on the lane picking up the sound. I need the sound to picked up at several different spaces on the lane - as I wanted to look at the lane in greater depth. I also came across to this picture on the right, which was made by Karyl Newman, who is an artist and a scenographer. While it is a simple design and shows the oscillation of sound. It almost looks like the New York skyline with reflections onto the river looking onto it from Weehawken. This is quite inspirational as it shows sound oscillations can show striking imagery. A sculpture produced by Benjamin Maus called Reflection. This was produced for a festival called Frozen, in Amsterdam 2009. It basically shows 12 successive musical notes analysed by a frequency detector which then goes onto form a mesh and hence the raised peaks in the sculpture shown. In my final piece, I could utilise a similar method and show the topography of the lane and possibly overlay frequency detection over it to form a sound generated visual of Pin Lane.

Fluxspace is an architectural movement created by Lise-Anne Couture and Hani Rashid’s office, Asymptote, back in 1987. What this series has achieved is that they have collated the digital content related to the urban structure of cities such as Hong Kong, New York etc, and have projected this out through a mscape (motion scape) room. In the above picture - the projec-tions are made onto an amorphous shape hanging in the middle of a room with mirror covered wall. The resulting effect seem to create a fluid urban space and a virtual 3D architecture that surrounds the viewer. Again the mixing with virtual and physical architectures is shown here, by fusing both of them into the real physical space. Katie Davies attempts to transform sound into three dimensional models. What she does is takes a recorded sound and generates a model based on the sound output of the recording. It is interesting how the shape has come out to form an organic piece. It inspires me to look how I can use this in Pin Lane. One idea is to take a recording of sound coming from Pin Lane and create a three dimensional sound visualiser and on the actual model put pin lane imagery on it. One way to achieve this is to create a sphere and on the surface put an image of the actual part of Pin Lane to show where exactly the recording has come from. Whilst I have been looking online for inspiration, I got thinking about sound prints and how they like footprints from the past. Using footprints literally seems a bit obvious, but I wonder if I can incorporate this into my design.

Process Three

Testing Techniques

There several testing techniques I had to do. The first was an idea on how I could immerse people within a sound visualisation. The way I did this initially before I got the projectors, was align 4 LED lights and then create smoke in the middle and see if there was what would form in the middle. It felt obscure and difficult to do this (see left). So I decided to get the projec-tors, and try it this way. It was an obscure and difficult to achieve this. I felt that it was difficult to achieve a visualisation with this respect. So I abandoned this avenue of interest.

The other types of testing, was using a topographic sound visualiser and see how effective the visualisation looked in using this method. I felt it was too intricate and delicate and really make the pin lane abstract and I didn’t want to lose this effect. I didn’t want to get lost in this.

I looked into possiblity of doing a live souind visualisation installation, however, I felt this was difficult as a generator would be needed and a system that could run at least two projectors, So hardware and financial limitation ruled this out of my possible ways of presenting the final visualisation.

Process 4After my research I needed to figure out how I was going to present this sound visualisation. Should I demonstrate this live? Create a gallery installation? These were the some of the options I had to consider. I decided I wanted to create a series that showed the layers of visualisation and effect on Pin Lane. and present as a gallery piece. The series would consist of firstly an orignal piece, then followed by the original layered with the sound visualisation, followed by the final piece that would have the soundtrack manipulated to give the musical element to the lane. Then I needed to figure out what part of Pin Lane was I going to use in my visualisation? I decided to utilise a viewpoint of PinLane were you could see the vanishing point of Pin Lane. The reason being, the sound reverberates along the lane. I felt that it was important to show this. I decided to go with a timelapse of sunrise in Pin Lane achieved by using a digital slr, a laptop, and a timelapse shoot-ing application. I then combined this using software to create a short piece movie piece in HD quality. During the filming of the time lapse, I also recorded the sound using a digital recorder. I then sampled a small loop that best represented sunrise in Pin Lane. From this I combined the loop to go with the timelapse. Then using Quartz Composer, i created visualisations that would react to the soundtrack. I experimented with several designs and felt the more simple the visualisation is, the more effective the impact would be overall. Finally, I placed a layer where the soundtrack was manipulated to highlight an eerily interesting music. I wanted to do this because in some way I wanted to highlight, yes this is noise, however if you listened carefully and since subjected to it a lot of times, the noise in Pin Lane is in it’s own way musical to itself. So this will be presented in a third piece and at the same time I didn’t want to not expose the original soundtrack hence the original was left in the first two series.

My final piece is a sound visualisation image of a section of Pin Lane superimposed on a timelapse video. It will show a visualisation of sound generated in Pin Lane, thereby forming the sound footprint. The image of Pin Lane correlates to where the sound is collected. Whilst samples of sound could have been taken at several different points of the lane, I felt this was unnecessary as the sound reverberates through the lane and I felt that unless it was a live instal-lation it wouldn’t look effective. More about the live installation will be discussed later. I used sunrise as my basis of interest, as the sound of the birds was at it’s peak. Also I had minimal man made noises at this time, so I could make the most of the natural sound print of the Lane. What could have been effective is that if I could use a surround sound microphone and be able and then use this sound to create a surround sound installation. However, I was limited by hardware accessibility to achieve this.

The sound visualisation was kept simple as I didn’t want to subtract from the original footage of Pin Lane, so people could see that this was Pin Lane. I felt the more intricate and ornate (see left) the design is, the more it would be confusing in terms of trying to relay the message of sound prints in Pin Lane. The duration was kept minimal as the time lapse was focussed on a shorter period of time. If however, I had a longer installation period maybe having a long piece would be just as effective. Perhaps even having it at normal speed as oppose a time lapse shot would have been ideal. However, due to limitations of how long I could install the piece, I decided to keep the duration short and make a series out of it, to show layers being put on the Pin Lane, building up to a final piece.

I would have preferred to do a live installation on Pin Lane and do a realtime sound visualisation. However, I needed several projectors to achieve this - and thereby I needed some form of way to include several projectors over several systems and then a way to power these systems. Net-working wouldn’t have been a problem, as I could have achieved this through Quartz Composer. So the limitations were power, hardware and money in this idea.

Overall, the piece is very powerful in a subtle way in the fact that the sound visualisation mimics the stones and project upward showing the sound caused by predominantly the birds. The fact that they go so high up and further down, shows how the sound affects all parts of Pin Lane. I felt this was a very good effect and captures the atmosphere of the lane. The colours have been simple and sharp, allowing a stark contrast between the Pin Lane in the background and the sound visualisation. I kept the visualisation with reduced opacity, so it would be possible to see through the visualisation, making it easier to see through and not lose sight of the original piece. With the resources and the hardware available, I feel this is a powerful piece.

Conclusion

Radiohead - House of Cards Music Video. This video shows a sound generated video - generatingReflection by Benjamin Maus Here he takes sound frequency and generates on a mesh creating a 3D sculpture. Sound of Music by Walt Blumfield His abstract interpretation of sound coming out of the musicians as waves inspires to show sound visually - giving the atmosphere and mood to the scene. Stone history in Scotland Report - http://www.sslg.co.uk/BWSS.pdf This has inspired the whole idea of using stones to tell the story of what is going on in Pin Lane. Creative Apps - http://twitter.com/creativeappsA twitter feed that promotes visualisation of all sorts of data Katie Davies - http://www.katiedavies.com/soundprint.htmlSound print models produced on a 3D scale by this artist, has inspired me to look at the stones giving out the visualisation.

References

Aqeel Akbar

iDAT306 - Production of Space

April 2010