Listening Glass
Listening Glass is an installed, interactive, audio-visual instrument. First presented in April 2004, Listening Glass was built onto the front window of First Draft Gallery in Surry Hills, Sydney. Co-creators Rene Christen and Jasper Streit developed Listening Glass to feed off the sounds from the outside environment, and the sounds of people outside the gallery window.
Christen describes the Listening Glass experience ‘… the work pulsates with the collective pulse of the public. Like a DNA donation to the evolution of the entity, affecting the work in such a way that it becomes unique through the interminable interaction specific to its location.’
Listening Glass uses the front window of the gallery as a type of sound diaphragm, in which the vibrations from outside sounds are picked up and fed into the instrument system. Sounds processed by the instrument are simulataneously fed back through the glass to the street outside. The incoming sounds also affect the instrument’s visual output, projected onto a screen behind the glass window at night.
As an instrument, Christen feels that the ability for people to input sounds into the instrument system (via the building structure) is central to seeing the work as an installed instrument. The front of the building turned into the instrument’s interface, people play it to input sounds into the instrument system, to have those sounds processed in realtime, and sent back to you, through the glass to the street outside. In forming part of the interface, the gallery’s metal security grill, protecting the glass window, provided a readymade structure for people to play and create sounds for the instrument to process.
sound granules
‘… the fragmentation of the incoming sound is important to the aesthetics of the soundscape – where the physical world sound is ‘frozen’, re-arranged, stretched and pitched; the original altered, yet still discernible.’
For this version of Listening Glass two microphones were used to receive sound from outside – a piezo transducer stuck to the glass with silicon, and a vocal microphone placed through a crack in the wall near the edge of the glass window.
Both audio feeds were combined to one audio input, with the audio feed buffered for approximately 10 seconds. During this time the incoming audio undergoes some granular processing, including a random element, as well as pitch shifting to prevent and disguise feedback between the two sets of transducers (one pair receivng, and one pair transmitting sound signals), both attached to the glass window.
The two mono-output speakers, called ‘soundbugs’, were also stuck to the window, sending vibrations through the glass to the street outside.
video elements
The instrument’s visuals consists of three video looops controlled by a patch in Max, and dependent on the dynamic level of the incoming sounds. The video loops were projected onto drafting film on the inside of the Gallery window at night.
Video loop 1: ‘cellular automata’, is a small loop taken from an implementation of John Conway’s [I]Game of Life[/I] (1970). Loop 1 attempts to replicate one-celled life as black and white pixels.
Video Loop 2: consists of visual whitenoise, presented at the same resolution as the Video loop 1 cells.
Video loop 3: produces intermittent pulsations of white light.
All of the video loops were rendered with a common black mask to achieve a ‘microscopic’ aesthetic to the projected visuals. A fader is used between lops 1 + 2, and between loops 2 + 3. Dynamic/volume level is the parameter controlling the fades between loops, in realtime. Loop 1 appears in quiet moments; loop 2 appears in situations of medium dynamic; and loop 3 in periods of high dynamics.
Christen describes the interaction between sound and video ‘… the sonic intensity feeds the ‘pixel cells’ growing on the digital plane, building up to a critical mass appearing as visual white noise. This white noise consists of all frequencies at once, a saturation that is the opposite of emptiness.’
