Sound Garden is a musical installation that explores the relationship of people, location, and audio relative to technology. In this context, people include those who use, visit, listen to, and tend the garden. Location means both physical and virtual spaces, and audio refers to manifestations of sound, silence, noise, and music. The technology explored in this project specifically includes interactive, telematic systems, digital signal processing (for audio), multi-speaker amplification, environmental sensors, and artificial life (A-Life) systems.
This is a continuous musical work, meaning it is not defined by a performance of any particular duration. Listeners may situate themselves in the garden at the installation site or online and remain indefinitely. The music is characterized by sonic events that are unique in the moment—a personal and poetic sensation of sound, where listeners construct an individual musical experience as the focus of their listening shifts over time.
In the tradition of the physical work associated with organic gardens (planting, watering, fertilizing, weeding, pruning, etc.) Sound Garden provides an online interface that allows listeners to tend their sonic environment and take an active role in its composition and care. Using a web browser to select from a menu, listeners can contribute their own digital audio files (musical material, voice and environmental recordings, etc.) and become gardeners that help to form the overall sonic landscape of Sound Garden.
Because each sound is unique, the "seeds" that are planted will significantly affect the primary characteristics of the garden. A generative musical system uses Particle Swarm Optimization (Kennedy & Eberhart, 1995) to grow these seeds and define the overall structure. But Sound Garden is also largely shaped by events that occur at the site of installation. Environmental sensors tracking ambient light levels, temperature, motion, and vibration act on individual sounds that compose the garden. These sensors serve as additional layers in the musical system, and control a variety of signal processing parameters. As environmental conditions shift and change, the sensors reflect that change in the garden's constant growth and development.
My musical works are primarily concerned with the idea of becoming. In Creative Evolution, Henri Bergson writes about becoming and our perception of reality, "Matter or mind, reality has appeared to us as a perpetual becoming. It makes itself or it unmakes itself, but it is never something made." I seek this same quality, and work to compose music within interactive systems that leads to a becoming of sound—music that is making, unmaking, but never made.
Sound Garden uses technology to enable an artistic process of collaborative, musical creation through generative systems and self-organization. In improvised music, self-organization is the phenomenon that accounts for the uncanny musical dialogue heard between musicians. In the world of technology, particularly in the field of Artificial Life, self-organization is a defining characteristic of a synthetic living system. Similarly, one can find self-organization and emergent behavior on the World Wide Web in wikis, blogs, and community-based sites such as del.icio.us, slashdot.org and digg.com. If one looks carefully enough, self-organized behavior permeates many other facets of the arts, technology, and indeed our daily lives.
The dynamics of self-organization provide two essential ingredients in Sound Garden. In this continuous, generative work, A-Life algorithms are used to maintain performance and ensure organic development over time. This project is also an experiment in musical self-organization. Like improvising musicians, those who visit Sound Garden will be able to make an individual contribution to the larger, group work. It could be said that this kind of freedom will result in cacophony and leave Sound Garden in a state of complete sonic incoherence (noise). But much in the way that improvising musicians listen to each other in the course of performance, or people contribute thoughtfully and respectfully to a community flower garden, I anticipate that Sound Garden participants will act with sensitivity in response to the musical ecology that is created and sustained by this work.
Sound Garden in the media
"Cultivating the Sound Garden" from the IU News Room
Attention from networked_performance
Short documentary video by Corey Hensley: SoundGarden.mp4 (opens in new window)
or see it on You Tube (opens in new window, but not a reliable link...)
How Sound Garden would work for Spark 2009
I attended the Spark festival for the first time in 2008. It was serendipity to meet Paula Matthusen from NYU that week because we had corresponded about Sound Garden via e-mail the past summer. As we talked at the Saturday night Spark party, I thought that this piece would be a fantastic addition to the festival. Sound Garden thrives when it can be actively tended, and I can think of no better environment than a festival flooded with digital artists and musicians.
Spark runs for six days, which would allow attendees a comfortable period in which to engage in the telematic musical collaboration Sound Garden can support. Additionally, because Spark reaches out to an international audience, it would potentially attract musicians from around the globe to join with those who are in Minneapolis during the festival. Sound material is ultimately provided by all who visit, whether online or at the actual site. Visitors cultivate the garden with their own short recordings, samples, soundscapes, and found sonic objects. Through an online interface, visitors become "gardeners" who "plant" MP3 files they would like to hear, and "prune" the files they want removed. Like any improvisation, it is a matter of listening, patience, and mutual musical communication.
The West Building of the Regis Center would be a superb location for Sound Garden. I remember in 2008 that it let in a healthy amount of natural light, which is important to the "growth" of the garden. In addition, this building felt like a main artery. I'm not certain if this was due to usual student traffic, the 2008 festival, or both. Whatever the case may be, human presence acts to shape the development of the garden and it thrives best in a public space like Regis Center West.
Physical installation & online interaction
The physical installation involves four speakers, environmental sensors, and a Mac mini computer that controls the piece. The installation site should be accessible within regular building or gallery hours of operation; the web stream plays 24 hours a day. All interaction is done through the online interface. Those who are able to visit the site can sit with laptops and use a wireless connection to tend the garden. Those who are offsite interact in much the same way but must listen to the Sound Garden stream over the Internet using iTunes, QuickTime, Real Player, or Windows Media Player. For more on this, see technical requirements.
Spark attendees, university students and faculty, and visitors from the community who wish to interact by engaging in sonic gardening are all welcome! There are a few technical necessities that, beyond computer and Internet access, should cost very little, making this a very accessible work. The basic requirements include: