Sonic Welcome

Space … has its own personality that tends to modify, position and move sounds by means of absorptions, reflections, attenuations and other structurally related phenomena

Alvin Lucier, 1979

What are the initial experiences that greet us in a new space?

I was curious to see if there are distinctive sound characteristics and if these sonic signatures could be discerned. Responding to Alvin Lucier's (1979) assertion that 'careful listening is more important than making sounds happen', I envisioned surfacing these differences and inviting others to listen.

I placed a 360-degree audio recorder in the entrance spaces of a number of buildings on campus and recorded their sounds.

When listened to with headphones, these recordings create a binaural recording, enabling spatial location of recorded sounds, which I paired with a photograph of each location and edited into a short film, placing each sonic experience in quick contrast to the others (figure 2). This film enabled a collapsing of distance and time, allowing the listener to hear the similarities and differences between the sounds of each building.