Crowdscapes: A Crowd-sourced Soundscape Installation
Anıl Çamcı, Julia Xu & Tanya Lai
As we adjust to social distancing practices due to the COVID-19 pandemic, our relationship with our surroundings is evolving in fundamental ways. Certain aspects of our daily routines move out of focus whereas others become magnified. Our everyday environments can be familiar yet stripped of their social dimension. Crowdscapes aims to bring these experiences into a shared space in the form of iterative and branching virtual sonic environments. Using the browser-based immersive audio tool Inviso (http://inviso.cc), the participants will reflect upon and share their experiences through sound and virtual movement. Each branch will accumulate into an assemblage of solitary experiences in the form of crowd-sourced soundscapes, whether these may take the form of a documentation or an abstraction of our current situation.
Instructions:
The installation utilizes the immersive audio design tool Inviso (http://inviso.cc), which is accessed via desktop browsers and best experienced with headphones.
Installation Guidelines:
To see the current hierarchy of participant designs, go to this Google Doc.
You can select any design and build upon it. Simply download and import the zip file into Inviso (http://inviso.cc). You should add at least one new element to the base design you picked. You can remove elements from the base design as long as you retain at least one element from it. Both literal and conceptual representations of your daily environments are welcome: you can design an auditory simulation of your environment with recordings or found sounds, or you can create abstract representations with synthesized or composed elements.
When you are done with your design, export it and go back to the Drive folder of the participant whose design you built upon. In that folder, create a new folder with your name and upload your Inviso export into this new folder using your Google account. Once you do this, the Google Doc will be automatically updated with your contribution included in the hierarchy of participant designs (i.e. you don’t need to edit the Doc yourself).
Inviso Quick Start Guide:
You can press “+” and click anywhere to create SPHERES with omnidirectional sounds. You can populate these spheres with CONES with directional sounds. You can press “+” and draw anywhere to create ZONES with non-directional sounds. You can move your HEAD in the scene with W, A, S, D keys or with your mouse. You can add 3D motion TRAJECTORIES to the spheres and the head.
Aerial View allows you to move objects horizontally. Tilt the scene by click-and-dragging to go into Altitude View, where you can move objects vertically. Edit Object Mode allows you to fine tune your cones. You can also control each element parametrically using the GUI window. You can pause individual elements or the entire scene. You can duplicate any element and undo or redo your actions. You can use any audio file from your system or search for sounds on freesound.org. When you are done, you can export your scene.
Installation Link:
Design platform: http://inviso.cc
Sharing platform: Google Docs
Visit the #installations-crowdscapes channel on the NIME Slack for discussions.
