LISTENING MIRRORS

 

// Listening Mirrors 2.0 is a sound art installation and evolving instrument that warps and blurs the boundaries between real and imagined realities, opening up a new space for participants to explore these two worlds as one. It challenges our perception with augmented audio reality system and promotes shared modes of musical expression for musicians and non-musicians alike.

 

The instrument investigates ways in which sensory otherness can be made possible using an Audiomented Sound System (ASS) and acoustic mirrors, whilst exploring how such environments promote new body-technology relations and collaborative sonic expression.

 

Listening Mirrors 1.0 was composed of a parabolic acoustic mirror (built from aluminium metal sheets, piano wires and 3D printed joints, and brought under tension with double bass strings, bending each piano wire and aluminium sheet to form its parabolic shape), and an IOS app built with OpenFrameworks, LibPD with bone-conduction headphones. To give us more creative freedom, we built Listening Mirrors 2.0, which has its own custom-made hardware system for audio augmented reality (a transceiver with bone-conduction headphones). These elements are digitally networked and excited by transducers that stream sound from the real and imaginary sonic environments.

 

As the participants enter the space, they are asked to wear the bone-conductor headphone and clip on the Audio Augmented Reality headset. From that point the participant is experiencing two sound worlds: the inner one (fed through the headphone) and the outer one (fed through their own hearing).

 

Audiomented Sound System (ASS)captures and alters the participants own breath and voice, and also alters our auditory and proprioceptive experience. Each participant’s sound is played in real-time back through the headphones and also the parabola.

 

The parabola itself is both an instrument that can be played (percussion, strings) and a speaker that projects the audiences’ combined voices and breath.

 

 

 

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

 

// Cécile Chevalier & Chris Kiefer are a FR/UK artist duo who test out the sonic, physical and technological boundaries of collective experiences through interactive sound art. They locate their work within cybernetics and systems art, drawing on new algorithmic and material technologies, creating technologically altered perception and playful interactive experiences. The collaboration is equal in merging together systems aesthetics, musicology, sound and material aesthetics, instrumentalist and computer science.

 

 

 

EXHIBITION, PUBLICATION & CONFERENCE

 

// Listening Mirrors 2.0 @the Sussex Humanities Lab, University of Sussex (review) //// Listening Mirrors 1.0 @Fort Process sound art Festival, Newhaven, UK Sept 18 (exhibition) //// Chevalier, Cécile and Kiefer, Chris (2018-2021 date tbc) What Does Augmented Reality mean as a Medium of Expression for Computational Artists? Leonardo. ISSN 0024-094X (Accepted - 2018) (journal article ) //// Chevalier, Cécile and Kiefer, Chris and (2018) Listening Mirrors, International Conference on Live Interface (ICLI), Porto, Portugal (conference & conference proceedings) //// Chevalier, Cécile and Kiefer, Chris (June 2018) Towards new modes of collective musical expression through audio augmented reality. New Interfaces for Musical Expression, Virginia, USA (conference & conference proceedings) //