Output details

Significant Birds. Sound installation. Part of ILLUSION exhibition at Science Gallery, Dublin: 11th July to to 29th September, 2013. DVD and exhibition brochure, which evidences date of dissemination.

Developed for the exhibition ILLUSION at the Science Gallery in Dublin, this 12 channel sound installation uses software partial tracking techniques to create a unique aural illusion. The piece breaks down a voice recording of an excerpt from Herman Helmhotz’s On the Sensation of Tone into twelve rapidly fluctuating sine waves, resembling bird song. Each is played back from a single loudspeaker. These 12 speakers are suspended, each in a birdcage, distributed over a 3 meter square area. Timing and amplitude are manipulated so that the sounds drift apart and then coalesce into recognisable speech. While no single physical source for the perceived speech exists in the space the brain re-constitutes it and is incapable of truly separating the individual partials. As the harmonics are gradually pulled apart in time the intelligibility is lost leaving a virtual “aviary” of chirping sinewaves.The exhibition is curated by Britain's Professor of the Public Understanding of Psychology, Richard Wiseman, and focuses on all manner of (mostly visual) illusions as a way of illustrating the activity of the brain. The research extends techniques developed for output NPa2, The Exploded Sound, however the aims are somewhat different, focussing on the awareness of perceptive processes and the exploitation of illusion to give insight into scientific ideas. A major aspect of the illusion is the lack of directionality due to the lack of a single source. While the voice is clearly intelligible any attempt to locate the sound source is in vain.