A Periodic Table of the Elements: Sonoma County
A landmark new installation which uses interactive computer software to allow the user to build their own customized Sonoma soundscape from a collection of 118 organized 'elements', all recorded in the county.
The project was first presented in 2013 at Hammerfriar Gallery in Healdsburg, Calif.
A version for lower Manhattan is in development now. The Periodic Table of Sonic Elements is ideally suited for installation in natural history museums, representing as it does the current trend towards mashups, and interactive access to museum collections. The Sonic Table perfectly combines the visuals of a collection item with its soundworld, triggering imagination. Further, the Sonic Table is built on the principle of acoustic partitioning (See Bernie Krause and the Niche Hypothesis), which dictates that in nature individual animals avoid competing with each other in the same frequency space, singing different notes to be clearly heard through the din. The real-time scrolling spectrogram on the display of my installation allows one to see the effect of adding in different sounds, and can clearly demonstrate what happens to birdsong when traffic noise gets to loud. We can also build a simulation which allows one to design sounds that fit neatly into the existing soundscape, and see how noise pollution undermines natural life.
The project was first presented in 2013 at Hammerfriar Gallery in Healdsburg, Calif.
A version for lower Manhattan is in development now. The Periodic Table of Sonic Elements is ideally suited for installation in natural history museums, representing as it does the current trend towards mashups, and interactive access to museum collections. The Sonic Table perfectly combines the visuals of a collection item with its soundworld, triggering imagination. Further, the Sonic Table is built on the principle of acoustic partitioning (See Bernie Krause and the Niche Hypothesis), which dictates that in nature individual animals avoid competing with each other in the same frequency space, singing different notes to be clearly heard through the din. The real-time scrolling spectrogram on the display of my installation allows one to see the effect of adding in different sounds, and can clearly demonstrate what happens to birdsong when traffic noise gets to loud. We can also build a simulation which allows one to design sounds that fit neatly into the existing soundscape, and see how noise pollution undermines natural life.
A Periodic Table of Musical Instruments
Preliminary sketches of an idea suitable for installation in a music museum, drawing together diverse cultures, or simply collecting 100 different sounds from the same instrument, ready for remixing and mashup by the visitor:
