fugit irreparabile tempus
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What happens when the sound of a room travels through the Internet?
This sound piece investigates the effect of time lag and delay
of the sound of a room sent on different servers and replayed
on a local machine and on the metamorphosis that these changes
in substance imply. Through experimenting and analyzing the
impact of translocal navigation through space, Tempus Fugit
attempts to find phenomena generating the emergence of
aesthetically interesting sound.
Live
Network Music Festival, Birmingham, 23 Feb 2013
Music Hackspace, London, 15 Nov 2012
noise=noise, London, 4 Oct 2012
Dorkbot, London, 25 Jan 2012
Queen Mary University, London, 24 Jan 2012
References
Main references to this work are Alvin Lucier, in particular
his work "I am sitting in a room", Agostino di Scipio's
compositions made of non recorded environmental sound,
and Roy Ascott's telematic experiments.
Blablah
The ancestral dream of ubiquity has been partially fulfilled by
current technology and the practice of network music has gone
through a prosperous development over the last decade. Reasoning
about sound from a physical perspective, we can say that sound
is pressure when it propagates in a room, that it is voltage
when it is in the form of electric current and that it becomes
information and bytes when it is encoded and decoded by a personal
computer. From a metaphysical perspective, sound, passing through
these different forms, does not change its essence but changes in
substance. What happens when the sound of a room travels through
the internet? Let's imagine a setup where the ambient sound of a
room, after being captured by a microphone, is transformed in
signal and the signal is digitized and encoded so to be streamed
to a remote server. If the computer streaming, or another computer
placed in the same room, becomes also a client of that server,
the sound of the room is received in that same room with a time
delay. If the stream is amplified, the sound of the room is augmented
by its own sound coming from a fragment of time in the past. This
past sound is enriched and modulated by the artifacts of compression
and translocal navigation. The positive feedback, or Larsen effect,
is complex because it is generated by the sound of the room on the
one hand, and by the live stream that has a delay on the other hand.
Time and space become a sonic perception: when the sound comes back
to the room where it was originated, it is deformed and affected
by travelling through remote places, and while it talks about the
present, it brings to memory a fragment of time that belongs
to the past.
Disclaimer
Il tempo fugge. E poi ritorna.
What?
Sed fugit interea, fugit irreparabile tempus, singula dum capti circumvectamur amore.
Yet meanwhile it flees, time flees irreparably, while we are captured by the love of every little single thing.
Virgil, Georgics, 29 BC.
Tech (2013, now archaic)
- PA
- internet connection
- mixer
- 1 zoom recorder
- 1 broadcast mic
- 3 sound generators
- 3 servers (AT/NL/NO)
- 1 Gumstix computer on module
- Overo arch
- 1 Lenovo x61
- Debian OS
- mplayer, Gstreamer, Jack
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