Sensing Sounds in Space: Exploring Sound Properties

Sensing Sounds in Space Finding the Threshold of Awareness

It's easy to turn a deaf ear...

The sounds, the sights, the smells.

You are taking your They've been there your senses for granted.

Tomorrow, what whole life and you've missed if suddenly they were gone? What if you woke up this morning and the only senses you had were the ones . you actively appreon nti ciated yesterday? e t at Blind. Numb. Deaf.

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Take the extra minute and immerse yourself in the sights, smells, and around you.

Take that extra second. Take a second . glimpse, feel, whiff, and

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...to something you are used to IT University of Copenhagen BDMD E-2011

Digital Aesthetics Kjell Yngve Pedersen

Group 8 Seth Dubin Magnus Nielsen Julie Tollund Erin Walsh

Table of Contents Abstract .............................................................................................................................. 2 Keywords ............................................................................................................................ 2 Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 3 Research Questions .................................................................................................................... 3 Goals............................................................................................................................................ 3

Understanding Sounds and Soundscapes ........................................................................ 3 Research Strategy .............................................................................................................. 4 Playing the Pace ......................................................................................................................... 4 The Odd One In ......................................................................................................................... 5 Analog Throwback .................................................................................................................... 5

Experiment Results ........................................................................................................... 5 Conclusion and Discussion................................................................................................ 6 Tool Kit for Future Sound Aesthetic Projects ................................................................ 7 Precedent Cases ................................................................................................................. 7 References .......................................................................................................................... 8

Abstract We experimented with exploring sounds in soundscapes with the aim of determining what properties make sounds dominant, or what makes them fall into the unnoticed background. We aimed to determine the point in which a sound changes from background to foreground, and how sounds can be implemented to change people’s perceptions and play on their expectations. Much of this has to do with the individual person and how he perceives sound, and whether he is listening actively or passively, or if he is filtering the sounds based on his expectations of the space. We tested these realms by placing unfitting sounds of varying volumes and obscurity in different settings and collecting observers’ reactions.

Keywords Soundscape, Sound threshold, Foreground and background sounds, Perception, Expectations.

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Introduction

It is easy to miss something you are used to.

Sounds are all around us all day, everyday. They are there when we wake up and they are there when we go to sleep, they are even there while we are sleeping. Our everyday life is filled with sound and it is only natural to build up a resistance towards the informational overload that is the soundscapes of our daily lives. But is this resistance turning into an immunity? When was the last time you stopped in your tracks and took a moment to indulge in the sea of sounds surrounding you, from the cars driving past to the people around you or to the wind howling in every crook and cranny it is able to squeeze itself through. When was the last time you really appreciated all of the little details of the sounds you so often just ignore?

With this project, it is our intention to investigate the threshold between foreground and background sounds. When does a sound go from being just another drop in the sea to being a boat that floats above everything else? We are looking to investigate how digital sounds can be implemented in a way that will change people’s perceptions and play on their expectations of all the smaller sounds that surround them every day. This is all done with the intention of gaining knowledge about ways in which we can change people’s awareness of the soundscape they are in, to make people care about the things which they have started to ignore.

Research Questions 1. What is the threshold between foreground and background sounds, and when does a sound move from one category to the other?

2. How can digital sounds be implemented to change people’s perceptions and play on their expectations?

Goals 1. To gain knowledge about how to reform perceptions of objects and spaces to foster people to actively notice and evaluate their environments by reassigning their audible senses 2. To bring about an appreciation of people’s aural senses

Understanding Sounds and Soundscapes Sounds have existed since the beginning of time, yet with the modernity of new technology and digital culture, sounds have transformed from nature and formed a new pool of digital hums and electronically altered, synthesized creations. Scientists have started studying the effects of sound on society, which is a recent research undertaking. In a term coined acoustemology, it is argued that sound creates meaning, and listening is a vital path to knowledge (Michelsen, 2009). It is this turn away from the physical study of sound as waves and towards the theoretical study of sound as a medium of understanding that allows us to view sound as an aesthetic property.

When trying to analyze sounds we must first understand the structure of soundscapes.

Ferrington (1997) as cited in Macaulay, Benyon & Crerar (1998) suggests that soundscapes can be divided into three layers of acoustical information; foreground sounds, contextual sounds which add information about the foreground sounds, and background or ambient sounds. Where foreground sounds attract your attention,

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contextual sounds help you orient to the environment, and background sounds provide the ambient sounds.These definitions provide a basis for further classification of sound, from natural to digitally produced sounds.

Luc Döbereiner of the Institute of Sonology in the Netherlands, wrote an article dealing with the aesthetic and philosophical aspects of “non-standard” sound synthesis techniques. What made these techniques, which arose in the 1970s, “nonstandard” were their deviations from attempts to simulate sounds. Instead, these methods use the digital medium to create new sounds, thus creating new meanings.

Brün, pioneer in electronic and computational music composition, describes this digital creation as “the composition of timbre, instead of with timbre” (Brün 2004, p.

189 cited in Döbrereiner, L. 2011 p. 29) Similarly, by digitally assigning objects and spaces new sounds, we are redefining the senses that were perhaps once overlooked and ignored.

By using a digital medium with artistic messages, “both technology and art actively transform human perception and cognition” (Döbrereiner 2011, p. 30). Digital reproduction can be defined as the “reiteration of relationships that already exist” (Moholy-Nagy 2004 p. 332 cited in Döbrereiner 2011, p. 30) whereas digital production focuses on the creation of new relationships. Thus, the use of a digital medium to introduce unfitting sounds into an environment mixes both production and reproduction with the purpose of sparking people’s cognitive and perceptual understandings of their surroundings.

Research Strategy Our project research strategy is to place or plant obscure sounds in city spaces and to observe at which point the sounds become noticeable. This includes varying the volume level and changing the obscurity of the sounds in relation to the chosen setting.

We are using the “toolbox method” of research, which involves conducting several experiments that test out our research questions of sound thresholds and observing and recording the results. By using our own data collection and backing it with formal research, we hope to draw conclusions about what makes a user notice the sounds in their environment, whether foreground or background, and to invent future ways of helping users break the threshold of expectation and pay more notice to the details of sounds around them.

With these conditions in mind we designed three experiments.

Playing the Pace The concept behind this probe is that background sounds, and in this case, music, affects the behavior of people in that environment. For this, we set out to Strøget where a street band played several songs. With a camera, we captured the passersby during each song which we will use to analyze their speed. We did the same with customers in several shops playing different music genres/tempos. Finally, we gave volunteers mazes to finish, once while listening to easy-listening music, once while listening to upbeat music, and once during silence. The volunteers answered a short survey afterwards describing their experience with the experiment.

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The Odd One In The concept behind this probe is that people do not notice the ambient sounds around them, especially when they are ingrained into their expectations of the space. For this, we used an elevator as a controlled environment and implanted a speaker playing three different ambient soundscapes (at approximately the same volume) - rain, birds, and machinery - while people took elevator rides up and down. Once out of the elevator, we asked them about their brief experience in the elevator like; if they noticed anything out of the ordinary.

Analog Throwback The concept behind this probe is that people often ignore sounds they are used to hearing when doing common actions. For this, we went to a coffee shop and typed on our computers, a normal coffeeshop activity. However, the keyboard played a typewriter clicking and dinging. We conducted a similar probe with a digital alarm clock playing the analog tick tocks of an old wall clock. We observed and questioned people’s reactions to the new sounds. This experiment relies on Moholy-Nagy’s theory that digital reproduction changes people’s cognition of an action and “reiterates relationships” of a pre-existing action - that of typing (Döbereiner, 2011).

Here, the ties between analog typing and digital typing, for example, are related by a common sound.

During our project we also had the opportunity to set up an exhibition stand explaining and demonstrating our chosen experiments. Because of the very location-oriented nature of most of our experiments it was hard to reproduce the exact setup. We ended up reproducing Experiment 3 "Analog Throwback" and the essence of Experiment 2 "The Odd One In".

The setup worked like this: we had a digital clock set up with a phone taped to the back. The phone was playing the ticking sounds which made it sound like it was coming from the clock.

The other part of the setup consisted of a computer playing small 'clicks' on a keyboard press.

To demonstrate Experiment 2, we had a vibration speaker sending bird sounds into a table.

The table then spread the sound out in an attempt to make in non-placable and thereby more ambient.

Experiment Results

For the “Playing the Pace” experiment, most of the conclusions we drew from the people on the street and the stores were purely observatory, since the environments could not be perfectly controlled. It did seem as if the people walked faster on the street while upbeat music was played as opposed to silence and slow songs, but this could be for any number of personal reasons, such as the pedestrians being pressed for time. The stores did not show much difference in the gait of the shoppers, regardless of music; this was probably because we did our experiments on a Monday afternoon, which is a slow day for shopping and there were not many people in the stores to compare. However, the controlled experiment with the mazes supported our expectations: most of the participants finished the maze faster when listening to upbeat music as opposed to slow music and no music at all, although one participant finished fastest with no music, claiming that the music was a distraction from his completion of the maze. This participant demonstrated an active role in listening to and perceiving his environment, and because of this, his results were different than those who were passively taking in their surroundings.

For the "The Odd One In" experiments, we received quite varying results even depending on where we did the experiment. None of the participants noticed the natural sound, the low humming of a machine running. This would serve to prove that

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a sound in it's rightful environment blends easier and is more often ignored, as we suspected. When it came to the semi-natural sound, the sound of rain, we had people both noticing and not noticing. Some of those observed even looked out the glass window after hearing thunder sounds, checking for rain. With the bird sounds, most people noticed them fairly easily and those who didn't were usually people listening to music or actively listening to something else, which causes most ambient background noises to go unnoticed. This experiment showed us that the more a sound is played out of context, the more it sticks out and the more easily it is noticed by the listener.

For the “Analog Throwback” experiment, results varied. We received a few strange looks and laughs from patrons in the coffee shop when the keyboard produced typewriter clicks. People were asked to type something on the computer, believing the purpose was a reading comprehension exercise when in actuality we were observing their reactions to the clicks. Most were pleasantly amused. One respondent said, “It was a nice surprise. It made me nostalgic for when I used to play on my grandfather’s typewriter as a child.” In this way, introducing the new sound to an everyday action was able to create an awareness of the action and create new relationships between the ordinary and the meaningful. Another respondent answered, “The clicking made me notice my pace more than usual. I didn’t know I was a fast typist!” The clock segment of this experiment also garnered interesting results. Most people did not notice the ticking at all. Once pointed out to them, they couldn’t seem to not notice it. It only irritated people once they noticed it.

Conclusion and Discussion After synthesizing our series of experiments, we have come up with the general conclusion that digitally introducing new sounds to environments have a re-birthing effect on the ways people perceive their surroundings. Sound has the ability to take an active role in the aesthetic evaluation of the world rather than taking a covert unnoticed role, whether it be foreground or background sound.

The threshold between when a sound moves from the background to the foreground really depend on many different factors; of these, we tested volume and context. A sound played out of context is more likely to be noticed than one played in its natural soundscape as suggested in experiment 2. While the volume of the sound has a big impact on its noticeability, bringing a sound from background to foreground is more aesthetically pleasing to do through the use of context rather than brute force. From this we can conclude that a factor of differentiating between foreground and background sounds depend on the context of the surroundings you are in.

Experiment 1 showed that we could change people’s behavior by changing the tempo of the digital background music. It suggests that by playing music with a faster beat, we can stimulate people subconsciously to act faster. Experiment 3 displayed how we can go against expectations on a more conscious level. The participants took a greater notice of their actions, which challenged their presumptions. Through both conscious and subconscious implementation of sounds, we are able to change peoples actions, and change their perceptions by going against their expectations.

An unforeseen effect of our exhibition stand was that it proved just how quickly the human brain can get accustomed to certain sounds. During the two hours that the exhibition lasted, those of us standing at the stand already grew accustomed to the ticking sounds from the clock. This only proves to demonstrate our expectation that

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people grow accustomed to sound incredibly fast, and provides evidence of how quickly sounds move from the foreground to the background of our perception.

Likewise, some of the people who came up to the stand did not even notice the ticking clock before it was mentioned; after that they could not stop hearing the clock again. This is a good example of how a background noise can move from being passive to a foreground and very active sound. By making us aware of our surrounding soundscape, we move the awareness of sounds from background to foreground and vice-versa.

Tool Kit for Future Sound Aesthetic Projects People do not inherently notice the sounds around them, however there are key triggers that bring ambient background sounds to the forefront. One’s environment can be shaped subconsciously by background music. People are more likely to notice a sound played out of its natural soundscape than one played in the context of its natural soundscape. And finally, unexpected sounds can bring focus to the action which caused it. Unpredicted sounds added to everyday actions can bring new notice to simple actions.

Because our project was a toolbox of experiments that could serve as groundwork for future research, we have created ideas for further implementation. We could test if people will take more notice of their surroundings if sounds do not fit in, thus further expanding upon the way sounds can affect the perception of one’s environment. It would also be possible to go in to more depth about what makes a sound natural or unnatural to one’s surroundings; for instance, the hum of a refrigerator, while an unnatural sound, is natural in the context of a kitchen. The scientific reasons for what makes foreground and background noise could also be pinpointed with brain scans and neurological research. Urban spaces can also be further explored, and how sounds affect one’s perception of city spaces in comparison to rural spaces, such as train sounds versus bird sounds. The delay of sounds of given spaces to preserve time could also be experimented with, such as the sound of summer fountains in emptied winter fountains, or the sounds of a busy Metro station when no one is there.

Precedent Cases Presented below is a list of precedent cases similar to ours. They all revolve around experimenting with sounds or expectations or both.

Antena Anti-Boredom Campaign Commercial (breustige, 2007) This video is a good display of the concept we are trying to prove: how one’s expectations can affect their reality around them. Even though the car was not really swerving in to the other car, the driver still reacted because he expected the car to swerve. In this way, we want to compare how sounds affect the expectations of the listener, and how the expectations compared with the reality of what is being heard helps to shape perception of a space.

Shhh... Sounds in Spaces (BBC, 2004) London’s Victoria and Albert Museum transformed their visitors’ museum visit with innovative sound installations that seamlessly play according to the person’s physical location. With this approach, mini-pockets of environments were created in each space, immersing the visitors in a whole new museum experience. The addition of sounds open a whole new dimension of physical space.

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Adding Playful Interaction to Public Spaces (Dekel, A. et al. 2005) Public spaces are inherently interactive simply because they are environments designed for people, but the interactivity is one-sided. This article discusses three possible design solutions for implementing two-sided sonic interactivity into public spaces.

Bad Music in Public Spaces (Travel Leisure, 2009) The author of this article becomes irate upon discussing the bad background music choices of restaurants, hotels, and stores, arguing that the music choices ruin a perfectly serene experience. In theory, it is meant to go unnoticed, yet supposed to set a mood, but in practice, it often serves as sound pollution. Music does have a proper place in public spaces, but it is a delicate science to engineer a the proper mood.

Coke Zero Prank (jwtdigital, 2008) In this Coke Zero sampling, advertisers hand out free bottles of cola and play loud gulping noises while the people take their first sip. In this humorous way, attention is brought to the act of drinking, and people are explicitly aware of their actions through sound.

References Literature: Döbrereiner, L. 2011. Models of Constructed Sound: Nonstandard Synthesis as an Aesthetic Perspective. Computer Music Journal, 35(3) pp. 28-39.

Michelsen, M., 2009. Sound as Art, Sound as History, Sound as Culture, Sound as Theory. [online] Available at: http://auditiveculture.ku.dk/dokument4/ [Accessed 24 October 2011].

Macaulay, C., Benyon, D. & Crerar, A., 1998. Voices in the Forest: Sounds, Soundscapes and Interface Design. [online] Available at: http://www.sics.se/humle/projects/persona/web/littsurvey/ch10.pdf [Accessed 8 December 2011].

Online: breustige, 2007. commercial fake steering wheel. [video online] Available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_Hx4LL27ys [Accessed 3 December 2011].

BBC, 2004. shhh... sounds in spaces. [online] Available at: http://libweb.anglia.ac.uk/referencing/harvard.htm [Accessed 3 December 2011].

Dekel, A. et al., 2005. Adding Playful Interaction to Public Spaces. [online] Jerusalem: The Hebrew University with The Bezalel Academy of Art and design.

Available at: http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~amnoid/newchi/media/playful_interactivity.pdf [Accessed 3 December 2011]. jwtdigital, 2008. Strange Sound, [online video] Available at: http://vimeo.com/955415 [Accessed 21 November 2011].

Travel Leisure, 2009. Bad Music in Public Spaces. [online] Available at: http://www.travelandleisure.com/articles/bad-music-in-public-spaces [Accessed 3 December 2011]

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