These are everyday sounds in the most concrete sense of the word. City environments from Bergen are recorded with a Soundfield microphone. 1 B-format is created2 from these 4 channel recordings, and perspectives are in contant flux. Curves of jaw, pitch, roll simulate a pilot flying through the environments, giving a sense of a rotating city landscape, where the listener at times is hanging upside down over the city. This was done through Reaper3 with the Harpex4 plugin, saved to 8 channel ambisonic sounds, played at the outer circle of speakers of the 16 channel sound installation.
Recorded locations in Bergen were:
Nordnesparken.
Bergenhus fortress.
Skolten.
Various fontains.
Lille lungegårdsvann.
Store lungegårdsvann.
Fløibanen.
Fløien.
Brattlien.
Recordings are made at different times of the year, with variable weather conditions. They are not pure documentations of places, rather situations to be superposed to impossible situations; it’s at the same time rainy and dry, warm and cold. Soundscapes were the sounds presenting the most diverse environments, and the one category I did not try to classify by pitch, neither did they go through other types of processing than pure spatialization.
"The soundscape is any acoustic field of study. We may speak of a musical composition as a soundscape, or a radio program as a soundscape or an acoustic environment as a soundscape. We can isolate an acoustic environment as a field of study just as we can study the characteristics of a given landscape. However, it is less easy to formulate an exact impression of a soundscape than of a landscape. (...) A soundscape consists of events heard not objects seen."5
Some specific soundscapes trigger overall changes in the sound installation.
Superball rolling in a sink bowl will turn everything off, except the Jet whistle pheasant group.
The sound of an elevator will turn everything off, and make the Ravel percussion music more frequent.
Civil defense sirens will trigger the trombone contrabass drilling group, and keep only the Ammons text and morphing multiphonics.
The sound of stones dropped into water will be repeated with variable spatial perspectives. The installation will focus on the Ammons texts.
After a certain time, things go back to a default balance. All of these triggering mechanisms were involved in the self-composing sound installation Landscape with figures I. Delays made connections less obvious, competing triggers were at times able to neutralize each other. For Landscape with figures II, some of the secondary triggers were disconnected, as they made it difficult to control the development of the piece on cues.
It will not make sense to reproduce these spatial perspectives in stereo.
5 Schafer, 1994, The Soundscape, the Tuning of the World, p. 7-8.