Rebecca Maloney
Americas Press Office ,Boston
Arup staff collaborated on two interactive projects for SPUR’s exhibition.
Open from 12 November through 3 June, SPUR’s exhibition, Sound and the City, explores how sound influences our sense of place within cities through pieces from artists, designers, and musicians, among others. We helped create two distinct exhibits, “Conversion: Loss | Gain” and “the City Suite: 4 Small Pieces,” both of which encourage acoustic urban exploration.
“Conversion: Loss | Gain” provides an opportunity for urban dwellers to invert their usual sensory hierarchies and experience the city they inhabit sonically. In this immersive listening room, participants can take journeys to landmark destinations in San Francisco. On each journey, captured in 3D audio, you interact with the environment through the perspective of one of this city’s 20,000 low-vision and blind citizens.
Arup acousticians Josh Cushner, Nathan Stroud, and Shane Myrbeck collaborated with Bryan Bashin, executive director of the LightHouse for the Blind, and Chris Downey. The journeys allow listeners to sense what people like Bryan and Chris perceive as they travel through the city, providing a unique opportunity to understand a different type of splendour when experiencing the city blind.
“The City Suite: 4 Small Pieces” is an experiment in data sonification, relying on the evocative and immersive nature of sound to interpret four different San Francisco-specific datasets. Equal parts abstract composition and study in auditory perception, this piece uses sound so listeners can be immersed in the time and space of the incoming information differently than they would with a visual representation. This allows us to experience patterns rather than seeing them in two dimensions — encouraging a different way of listening and understanding.
Designed by Emily Shisko and Arup’s Shane Myrbeck, the composition is presented over an array of loudspeakers that are arranged in the shape of San Francisco, allowing listeners to identify neighbourhood-specific information by its location on the sonic map.