Chikashi Miyama (2017)
This work creates a virtual sonic diorama (= sonorama) of a city, which allows the participants to listen to the recorded soundscape of the city interactively, navigating their location in the virtual city by themselves.
Each recorded sound is placed in the virtual city according to the geo-location they are associated with (i.e. the place where the sample is recorded) and they are indicated as animated 3D spheres (sound sphere) in the virtual city. If the user location are close to each placed sphere, it starts to playback the recorded sound. The volume of each sound is depending on the distance between the user location and each sound sphere. Users are able to navigate the location by placing their hand in front of the screen. The user location moves towards the direction of the hand. The soundscape changes along with the movement of the user location.
For the ICST immersive lab, the sounds recorded in Zurich are employed, but the system can be reused for other cities by replacing the set of sound samples and the map data. More than 100 samples of sound from the Zurich city are planned to be recorded for this project. All recorded sounds are less than five minutes. The recorded sounds are all associated with geo-locations (longitude, latitude)
ZKM My City My Sound project ( http://mycity-mysounds.zkm.de ) collects sounds from different city. In the data base of My City My Sounds, there are already over 380 sound samples from 4 different cities. The recorded samples of the Zurich city are planned to be added to the ZKM database.
Artist Website: http://chikashi.net/
Artist Interview with Chikashi Miyama, where he talks about the piece’s ideas, concepts and makings (in English) – (recorded in July 2017).
