Professional Development Bursary blog – work so far..

Not only has the a-n bursary allowed me to spend time in the studio intensively experimenting with different projection techniques and editing videos, it has also given me the time to research forests. I have done this by immersing myself in various forests, watching, taking notes and photos and filming. As I watch and listen, I am constructing sequences for the installation, which will have time based passages, such as a rain sequence.

The sound in the installation will be a very important part of it and is being created by sound artist and composer, Nye Parry. In order to explore the kind of sound that will be in the installation and discuss issues relating to sound I decided to interview Nye. Here is our Q&A;

MB: How do you make the sound of a forest?

NP: In our project the task is more about producing the effects of a natural environment in the spectator (or listener) than trying to simulate the precise sound a forest makes. What is it about this kind of natural soundscape that we find relaxing or stimulating or restorative? For me that has a lot to do with space and spatial perception. Our ears are highly attuned to the perception of space. Every sound we hear carries with it information about where we are, where the source is and what the that spatial relationship consists of. When I hear someone talking in the next room I not only perceive that it is a person talking and possibly (but not necessarily) what they are saying, I can also tell something about the spatial characteristics of the room they are in, the room I am in, whether the door is open or closed, where that room is situated etc. The sounds of the forest are incredibly diffuse, there is a surprising amount of reverberation due to the large number of surfaces the sound reflects around but it is also possible to perceive sound over a great distance. These are some of the ideas I am trying to work with.

MB: If you are not trying to sound exactly like a forest, what kind of sounds are you working with?

NP: Despite my previous statement, at the moment I am actually working quite hard to imitate forest sounds particularly the way the wind moves through the trees, the approach and retreat of the rustling sounds that result. That said, I am using foley techniques more than field recordings. By using many small loudspeakers I can break down the effect into constituent parts – little rustles spread across a wide area for example, rather than reproducing the complete sound in one location. I am not rejecting any approach at this stage from synthesizing sound using noise generators and filters to recording paper chains and twigs. FI have also drawn on sounds from a piece I wrote in the nineties called Spring (from the Seasons – https://soundcloud.com/nyesonic/spring). This uses digital sound design techniques, particularly convolution, to produce a variety of almost naturalistic but still obviously digital sounds. In a way it has elements of the digital forest about it and I was interested in the way you recognise the sounds to be like something but don’t believe it to actually be that thing in the same way as in a painting you see both the surface of the canvas, the brushstrokes and also the object depicted. Roger Scruton refers to this as ‘double intentionality’ (Scruton, 1997, pp. 86-7)

MB: You mention using many speakers to create the effect of movement. What kind of technologies are you employing?

NP: Much of my work deals with space and the way music can be perceived as a navigable landscape rather than as a narrative arc. One way I have explored this in previous work is by breaking down sounds into individual partials and distributing them across anything up to 60 separate small speakers. In many ways I differ from a lot of composers who work in multi-channel formats in that I am fascinated by point sources rather than the movement or panning of sounds. When we hear the wind in the forest we are of course not hearing the wind itself, which makes no sound, but rather the effect the wind has on a large number of relatively stationary objects (the trees and their leaves). So I have decided to use lots (probably 32, maybe more Update: the final piece used a 55 speaker system) of small speakers again above the heads of the gallery visitors. I will use some multi-channel amplifiers built by Jamie Campbell (http://www.glisferox.co.uk/) that I first used in an installation called The Exploded Sound (http://www.nyeparry.com/exploded/). These will be controlled by a computer which will be adjusting levels and filtering sounds on the fly to create the movement effects I am after. They may also respond to some of the projections. I use Max/MSP for programming which gives my great flexibility to make changes right up to the last minute in the exhibition space. I love the process of installation, the way a piece really only comes together as a symbiosis of the space and what you bring to it and I always make a lot of decisions during the install.

MB Thanks Nye for taking the time to answer these questions

NP: My pleasure – I am really looking forward to installing this piece!!!

I visited, along with the composer Nye Parry, the brand new exhibition space at Royal Holloway University, where Digital Forest, my installation in making, will have its first public showing. (From April- July 2018)

It was really exciting to see the finished exhibition space, which is 100 square metres. It gave me a much clearer image in my head of what the eventual work will look like, and while on the train home I quickly did a sketch of where some things might go in the space, as otherwise I couldn’t stop imagining it. The space, apart from being really big, is state of the art, with controllable temperature and lighting etc and moveable walls so I can configure it as I want. As it is so new it has lots of convenient additions such as plenty of power points, which can often be an issue when installing my work as I use a lot of equipment. This installation is likely to involve the use 15 projectors – all with films that are timed to come on and go off at specific times, so along with DVD players, amplifiers and computers, I will be doing a lot of plugging in! The space is also a perfect fit for my work because it is totally self- contained and can be completely blacked out. My work always involves projected video, which I design to sculpt the space, so any light source other than the projector, or projectors, themselves, really intrudes and at worst can destroy the whole piece. Often curators don’t seem to understand this, and want to place my work next to other light based works or near emergency lights, which can’t be switched off. However, here there are none of those nightmares, just a blank canvas space, into which I will choreograph light, image and sound. I am really enjoying working on this project in the studio and can’t wait to see it installed.

I have been hard at work experimenting in the studio trying to create an experience that replicates the effect of a forest on attention. In the first blog I outlined the aspects of a forest that psychologists believe cause this effect. One of the areas mentioned is the balance between prospect and refuge, therefore, I am currently focussing on the change in depth of perception often encountered in a forest. For example, the way after walking through through a dense area, you might suddenly happen upon an expanse of seemingly infinite trees. I am experimenting with and developing some illusional and theatrical tricks in order to create a feeling of canopies and vistas opening up, even within the confines of an exhibition space.  It involves lots of two way mirror material and video projection. Creating the illusion will involve getting the light levels, type of projection, timing and the distance between the mirror surfaces just right, there is a lot of experimentation and fine tuning to be done.

The images show my initial experiments, at this point it still seems like it will take a lot of work – and some magic – to turn this into an experience like a walk through a forest. I can see what I want it to look like in my mind, but finding ways to transform mind pictures into reality is always the biggest challenge of all.

In this first blog post I will discuss the psychology research already undertaken about natural environments and attention, this research informs the art work I am creating.

Attention restoration is linked to landscape art, because studies show that our aesthetic preference for a scene often coincides with one that restores our attention, we rate a scene higher if it restores our attention even though we don’t realise it is having this effect. Indeed some argue that restorativeness is the reason we like certain scenes. (Van den Berg, Koole, Van Der Wulp, 2003) I find this interesting for many reasons, not least because it prompts questions about universals for aesthetic preference, which leads us to evolutionary answers. The traits in an environment that were helpful to early humans, such as those offering both prospect and refuge are still the ones which cause our attention to be restored and produce landscapes we aesthetically prefer.

Urban spaces can contain these traits but it is the natural space which restores attention. Why? There has been research about the properties that cause certain environments to have a high restorative value, and I will be drawing on it in the creation of my work. ‘Complexity’ and ‘mystery’ within the scene are both significant factors in predicting stress reduction and aesthetic preference. Complexity is simply defined by Kaplan as how much is going on in a scene or how much there is to look at, a scene with low to intermediate levels of complexity is preferred and offers the highest restorative value. This is understandable as such a scene is likely to have enough features in it to be useful in terms of offering refuge, but not be so overwhelmed with them that it is difficult to have a clear view. Mystery means something about a scene that draws the person in and makes them want to explore further, for example, winding paths or ‘enticement’, where the person is in the dark but can see an enlightened area.  Mystery evokes emotions and therefore adaptive reactions, and so evolutionarily it was a positive property for humans to encounter in an environment. Both of these factors will be fully exploited in my installation, which will be a dark space and will use use projected moving image and constructions that will hide certain areas of the space.

One of the most interesting and most important factors appears to be the geometry of the scene. Purcell, Peron and Berto (2001) speculate that natural scenes provoke high stress reducing and aesthetic responses due to an underlying fractal geometry, compared to urban scenes, which have underlying euclidean geometry. It seems it may be more specific even than that; within scenes composed of fractal geometry, it has been shown that a fractal dimension of between 1.3 and 1.5 offers the highest level of stress reduction. The fractal dimension gives a guide to the complexity of a scene as it is a ratio for the complexity of detail in a pattern as it changes with the scale at which it is measured. A fractal dimension of approximately 1.4 shows a low to intermediate level of complexity, which, as mentioned before, in a natural scene, would have offered the best chance of survival for early humans, and so today still produces the highest level of attention restoration. Intriguingly, some hypothesise that the neural mechanisms of humans are able to rapidly calculate the fractal dimension of a scene in order to quickly assess the habitability of an environment. I will be attempting to calculate the fractal dimension of the patterns in the moving images I am creating and will project. If possible, I will experiment with various levels of fractal dimension.

The moving images will be abstracted from original footage filmed in forests. The abstraction is designed to bring out and exaggerate the patterning inherent in forest scenes. This patterning will be explored not only in the form but also in the sound, the movement, and the cadence. Both sound and image will be presented spatially, with sounds and moving images travelling around the space in a similar way to a real forest. Composer Prof. Nye Parry will be creating the sound for the exhibit.

The installation will therefore be a real mixture of art and science, with a lot of experimentation in the studio to be done. I will follow up this initial blog with more pictures from the studio soon.

Images are from a short film I made of initial film sketches and ideas for the work, sound by Nye Parry.