You know I was going to respond like this, but..
That's why I don't show the video yet (you have found it). That was I think my 2nd video of someone walking through it (out of possibly hundreds, I don't even know - read on), quickly filmed while I was still working on it and submitted for assessment at uni as part of WIP documentation. I didn't actually finish the work until after the assessment when the exhibition opened. That showreel (as well as uploading it) was part of my coursework and isn't representative of the work, which was assessed in person. I haven't properly edited a document of the installation yet. I also experimented massively with setting up the sound in varying sensitivities and musical timbres, volumes etc. In the end it came down to a comprimise of what was going to be more effective; a sudden, loud sound or (my preference) a long, slowly crescendo-ing one. Unfortunately I kept being told to turn the thing down - if I didn't, someone else would have done or switched it off for me. Potentially killing my amplifiers. But strawberry float them (of course), I turned it up whenever I was able to check in on the work.
I have massively oversimplified the description of what this thing is, because the idea is very very simple, but it's more dynamic than is worth explaining. The work isn't about an explanation of what it is supposed to be or be about, it's a tool/apparatus for discovering this in the audience. Think about it more like a scientific or sociological experiment and has more in common with interaction design, psychoacoustical theory etc than fine art (although it is an artwork). A lot of it had to do with public intervention and how people don't normally expect to walk through a main corridor in an institution one day - right next door to office and classrooms - including visitors to the degree show, and be encroached upon forcefully by a disturbance such as this, that they are forced to walk through in order to reach their destination (ironically, this is also a fire escape route). It is only after a long time reflecting back on the work, what was and wasn't successful, other people's input etc, that I start to understand what the work is. If I knew everything about what the work was or was going to be - the effect it would have - I wouldn't have bothered making it. I would have just written down "Work no. 1214214" and gone to bed. That isn't why people make art.
You might think you could make something similar to this - it's not difficult in theory - but actually realising it, mainly the construction and the planning that goes into building a structure into a specific space, is more complex. It takes one thing to have an idea, and another to actually make it, and make it work. Alone. There were several not normally combined technologies involved, some programming, minor electronics and audio theory. Not off-the-shelf products. I have a lot to thank for Arduino and MaxMSP for this, as I'm not an electrician and barely a programmer. I'm a guitarist.
The tiny mic on my compact camera from several meters back is unable to capture the around 10-40Hz vibrations the corridor makes, actually you can only really feel them. The speakers are overdriven so what you hear in the video is pretty much just the high frequency speaker distortion (horrible sound, deliberate) and almost none of the harmonic bass, which is more like a helicopter or a lorry low flying or driving up besides your house. Those mics are tuned to picking up speech, not massive sub-bass.
I've recorded both the source midi notes generated, close-mic'd the speakers, and recorded ambiance while filming walking through it in first person, and even that still doesn't really work. I will need to edit it all together - I just recently cleared up some hard disk space so I have room for the ridiculous amount of scratch render files Final Cut makes while working with HD. Unfortunately I don't think I'm ever going to be able to reproduce such an experiential work in video, as no amount of video can make you physically feel vibrations, and the sense of pressure on your ears (like a festival concert does).
I have footage of streams of people walking through it (drunk people, children, blind people, old people probably with heart conditions
etc), and that's where it gets interesting.
Unfortunately for health and safety reasons I was only able to push to about 110dB which isn't that loud, but because the corridor is intentionally narrow (not as narrow as I wanted again due to fire safety), this increases the perceived volume by creating all sorts of reverberations in the material (MDF), surrounding walls, floor - you could actually hear the installation running from about 50 feet away, so it could be heard as it was approached i.e. "what the strawberry float is that sound?". The reverberation was also enhanced by a high gloss oil, although my tutors had no idea the strawberry float to do with any of this, which was disappointing. You could see your reflection vaguely in the surface, which was supposed to be another level of self-awareness, and an alien or lab-like aesthetic.
It isn't just one sample being triggered by passing through as that video implies. The corridor was cable of sensing movement along a 12 metre axis (all the way down the actual corridor, not just the false part housing the speakers) using highly accurate sonar (5x usually used in robotics). Processing this to MIDI the 5x sensors could individually control an axis/parameter that could be mapped individually or collectively to one or more combined realtime synthesised or sampled instruments. In the video this is reduced down to just about 2 feet for that test. Unfortunately I did have problems with interference that are too lengthy to get into here but I had a compromise in the end of about 6 feet of sensitivity.
The closer you approached the corridor, the louder the noise, or I could modulate any musical parameter, i.e. pitch, timbre, oscillation, wave-type, whatever or I could trigger and audio sample like music or sound effects.
The speakers are individually driven and so quadrophonic surround sound. This is completely different to playing 1 sound through 1 or 2 speakers representing a 2D pane, like a hi-fi does to reproduce the effect of watching a band on a stage. I took advantage of this to create an increasingly violent gradient of sound relative to the audience's movement along an axis. The sound is most intense in the center of the corridor, when "trapped" between all four subs sounding at their loudest. This would either cause someone to stay inside the corridor, trapped by curisoity (and often dance or play with the sensors, becoming a performer), or co-erce them out of it, if their personal reaction was to be alarmed or afraid. On the majority, most people wanted to get the strawberry float out of there, obviously more young and hippy kinda people wanted to dance around inside it and go all dubstep m8. I was interested in both.
So bearing all that in mind, it was a fairly powerful platform for playing sound/music in proportion to (technically), 2D movement within 3D space (or a 3D sound stage) and observing psychological/behavioral reactions to containing people within this sonic/architectural space.
The technological set-up wasn't the point at all (although it was interesting to use sonar to measure movement in space and then translate this into other sound - so the the input and output of the work is entirely acoustic in nature). All my work was interested in eliciting an emotional or physical engagement with the physical force of sound (not recordings of sound, or arrangements of sound, which is different). I turned the audience from a passive observer into a performer by framing their reaction to an apparatus and turning them into (part of) the performance. This way anybody could (in some work) appreciate the musicality of materials or (in others) focus on the experience of sound foisted onto them, and reflect upon why they react in a certain way. It is in some ways anti-art and certainly anti-authorial, as most artwork is still concerned with embedded meanings and the total authority of what the artist means to communicate, instead of motioning the audience into creating a performance. This was all filmed of CCTV, which most people ignore, so it was not trivialised by the audience knowing they
were performing to someone (which they would if you filmed them with a video camera or took photos of them). You can't just tell someone to interact with an object the way you want them to; the whole point of interaction design is studying what is intuitive for them to do. This formed a great deal of the research component of my degree.
The bizarre range of offbeat reactions (which were all filmed on the CCTV - the other half of the document I haven't made yet since it requires sifting through hundreds of hours of video) from people reeling back, running, shimmying, crawling, attacking the speakers (yes some visibly crazy/blind person destroyed the speakers), dancing and - just as noteworthy - walking straight through (showing how people tune out sound once they have learnt to expect it - actually supporting that sound is reactionary) proved those intentions to be successful.
You may not have read all of that but obviously the final work isn't indicative of everything that went into conceiving it. I've yet to see anyone else realise something like this in this context, and I have tried.
Anny; thanks, that's really cool. I'm afraid I built this into my university and had to destroy it; it was on show last June I just haven't publicised it at all. Unfortunately I wasn't able to hire a lorry to transport this to my shows in London at the time, and as it turns out, I created it pretty much permanently and so by taking it down most of the structure was destroyed. I have all the tech for it though, so if I managed to get some kind of award/stipend, I could install it again somewhere else. The wood wasn't all that expensive, hard materials were about £300. Total value was about 2k though; I used a lot of gear I already own or acquired for this. I would have strawberry floating loved to put this in London (I went to Vyner Street Gallery and the Gallery on Redchurch Street, but used other work). I think it might have got a lot more attention.
Someone jumping up and down in the corridor:
CCTV
(This was positioned primarily for the exhibition so that people would identify what my work actually was, and nobody noticed they were on film until
after they had moved through the corridor. As I mentioned before, that was really important.
Anyways, it was a really cool project. Some nice people told me it was the best piece of the degree show (only a shame it was hidden away by deliberately blending into the environment) and I got 70% which is a first.
At some point soon, I will remember I made any of this stuff and look for a residency/studio/exhibition opportunity, but as people may be aware, artists are a bit strawberry floated for funding at the moment.
tl;dr don't give a gooseberry fool, this is the first time I've written about this work publicly so thank you for getting me to actually do that or I probably never would have.