"Look Over Here" | Spatial Listening in the Virtual Realm

“Look Over Here”

Spatial Listening in the Virtual Realm

This Pecha Kucha Will: ● ● ●

Explore “Spatial Listening” in the Virtual Realm Investigate the Virtual Realm as a space which our bodies inhabit up to 9 hours a day.

Apply Acoustic Ecology and Spatial Listening as a methodology, to unmask a human narrative in this space.

Hello, what’s this?

“Spatial Listening” is the capacity of the auditory system to interpret or exploit different spatial paths by which sounds may reach the head. This article concerns spatial hearing; how people localize sound sources using binaural and monaural cues, and how they use echoes and reverberation to tell about the nature of the listening space. Using spatial hearing, the auditory system can determine the location of a sound source and ‘unmask’ sounds otherwise obscured by noise. It can also orient attention towards or away from a sound source. Spatial hearing is almost-entirely underpinned by ‘binaural’ hearing: the comparison of the signal at one ear with the other ear. These comparisons are reflected in terms of differences between time and level and are termed, interaural time difference and interaural level difference and are the basis of all binaural processing and are fundamental to nearly all spatial hearing.

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http://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/97 80199233557.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199233557-e-06

Spatial Listening Test Video One

Some Thoughts before Entering the Dreaming Forest How does the Virtual Realm contextualise Spatial Listening?

We cannot say for sure, and is it this way around anyway?

Acoustic Ecology, sometimes called ecoacoustics or soundscape studies, is a discipline studying the relationship, mediated through sound, between human beings and their environment. We will use a soundwalk, and personify the Virtual Realm as a dreaming forest (bare with me) to explore its nature, and possibly its designs upon us.

We use terms such as “mining” and “surfing” the internet - terms intrinsically tied to negotiating a physical plane. For all purposes, we are talking about a space: A narrative needs a space to occur - conversely, if there is a space, does a certain narrative occur? If so, should we not be further aware of this narrative?

We give this realm physical values and yet do not readily account for its nature.

Look Over Here The Virtual Realm is a Mycelium layer - a superat space that surrounds us; it goes straight through us. Yet, our bodies cannot truly reach it.

LAIN and the Mycelium Layer.

Heard and eerie, everpresent - how is access negotiated?

To Dream to Listen Engagement with the Virtual Realm is intermittent - like a fitful sleep our attention glitches between the browser, the car outside, YouTube, the smell of coffee on the table and the bruising sound of the espresso machine that snatches us away from our virtual dreaming.

Part dream and part real, we hear two planes of existence in discontinuity, spatial masking of one world over listening in on another as a single object, one which our bodies cannot fully access while the former distracts through corporeal interaction. “Rendered in the onscreen title as Mulholland Dr, with its suggestion of Mulholland Dream - the overwhelming tendency appears to move in the opposite direction: it is not so much that dreams become taken for reality, as that any apparent reality subsides into a dream.� - Mark Fisher

Glitching The Body - Legacy Russell on losing her digital cherry

How might we think about the body’s interaction with this space, and do we at all?

“Years later I think back on this time as a time where I first realized that the construct of "Away From Keyboard" (AFK), pitted against "In Real Life" (IRL)—what theorist Nathan Juergenson calls "digital dualism"—was truly false. Though I hadn't yet found the language to express this, the experience kicked off a longer journey of unravelling my own liminal identity. It was via virtuality that I was able to exercise this muscle first. I use the word "virtuality" for lack of a better term, yet, I still take issue with it. That which is "virtual" is assumed to not be real, yet it needs to be asserted that what happens in these vast digital landscapes is, in fact, very real, and non-negotiably so.”

This is indeed a space which affects the body. Let us use our bodies and particular our ears, to navigate this world, this world causes our bodies to glitch. A new cyber feminist movement calls for the body to glitch, but this is what the internet is causing us to do, not a willful decision initiated by ourselves in the first place.

Spatial Listening Tools and the Virtual Realm Might we be able to identify a method to use these tool towards the virtual realm?

Is a panorama, a series of opened tabs?

What would constitute a silent or resonant spot?

A Sound Map of the Virtual Realm Let’s make a Sound Map of this realm: Up, up, down, down, left, right, left right, click click click There is no: Through, over, under, above, around.

There is no depth, no texture, no presence.

Echolocation is not possible. When we call out, the realm forms around us anew.

Spatial Listening Test Video Two

The Avatar Cat Leading us Astray in the Forest The virtual realm is not exactly constituted of landscape but rather of seen and unseen avatars that call our attention and unroll a sense of time and space upon us.

The cat could be an ex-lover’s FB page, but it could just as well be a blue link but they are in the same place and emmanating beacons of sounds across the landscape and a bottleneck output.

Child

The Virtual Realm is timeless. It is all here, all in the now.

Spatial Listening to non-linear time.

This impacts our sense of narrative. Less in command - listening in rather than calling out. The negation of distance compresses time and space into an immediacy that our stories are not adapted to carry yet. We tell the same narrative unaware of the warping caused by the flat landscape - implicating aspects of time travel to our stories in an immediate space.

“This time he is close to her, he speaks to her. She welcomes him without surprise. They are without memories, without plans. Time builds itself painlessly around them. Their only landmarks are the flavor of the moment they are living and the markings on the walls.”

La Jetee, Chris Marker “The epitome of one who travels where space and time are in crisis, lost to machinic rhythmicity.”

Steigler

“Listening to the end of the world� and Story Telling for Earthly survival This is Locus Sonus, an online streaming project designed to allow us to listen live to the forests of the world, and listen to them die.

Donna Haraway's new direction consists of re-designing the human narrative. Our narrative appears to be changing out of machinic rhythmicity but are we listening?

We could begin using these terms to quantify conscious change in our narrative.

Here, we readily adapt it to ecology, but what of economy, culture, and other narratives.

Flat Earthers / Flat Screeners, and Brian Eno. The flat nature of the virtual realm has invariably affected our perspective on other realms, it has become a mode of listening, a flat one: With On Land, Eno wrote in his sleeve notes for the album, “the landscape has ceased to be a backdrop for something else to happen in front of; everything that happens is part of the landscape. There is no longer a sharp distinction between foreground and background” Rather than this being an effect of the East Anglican landscape, would this not more likely be an effect of computer listening (as a computer composer) shifting Eno’s outlook?

Spatialising the Screen and the Virtual Realm The eyes are most sensitive to red – is an experiential space created to present Geistė M Kinčinaitytė's project Bodies Inside Out, which explores articulations of corporeality in contemporary artists' moving image installations that aim at intensifying emotional and bodily sensations. The baroque aesthetics and logic defined in Gille Deleuze's The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1993) functions as a device exploring an intimate and dynamic movement between the viewer, image, and screen. This research has been presented in Rome in 2016 and Paris in 2017 at the conferences for cinema and media aesthetics.

For The eyes are most sensitive to red, composer James Wilkie has created a sound installation by responding to algorithms' reactions to the luminosity of the projected image and screen surface. Like water, the image spills out of the frame and generates a space through sound. https://vimeo.com/253084682

Unmasking the Virtual Realm - The internet as eerie When we sound out the virtual space, we discover that it is refractive. It is ever-adaptive and forming as a space. It is a space with a nature and behaviour.

Considering it this way, this realm is closer to “The Glimmer”, a prism. What does a prism sound like? And what does sounding out in a prism cause to our story?

This realm continues to shape us. Leading thoughts towards our entire world being a simulation.

Perhaps the sound we are looking to describe would be “feedback”. Is there any structure known to us physically that could represent this, and where the effects of such a structure could be measured?

Spatial Listening to the Algorithmic Forest “We hear only ourselves [...]

For we are gradually becoming blind to the outside.

Whatever else we still shape leads back around us [...] But we walk into the forest and we feel that we are or could be what the forest dreams. We walk between the tree trunks, small, soulful, and imperceptible to ourselves, as their sound, as what could never again become forest or external day and visibility.�

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Bloch

The virtual Realm is an Algorithmic one, one which adapts to us. Things may appear the same, but they are ever changing to us. Just like being lost in a forest. Were we to use echolocation, we would remain still while the sonic reflections would change all around us.

Leaving the Dreaming Forest The Virtual Realm is flat and timeless.

It shapes around us, and we shape ourselves to it in turn.

The act of Spatial listening could be a crucial tool in navigating this realm and its effects upon us which we still understand very little of.