Sound Installation

Materials:monitor, amiga 1200 running custom sound software, speakers, amplifier

With this series of sound installations, I was interested in treating with data which represents sounds as arbitrary so to reflect that all media, when represented as data in a computer memory, has no apparent meaning, but rather, is accompanied by algorithms and hardware, that we can interpret data re-presenting it with some physical form. The data is thus sub-symbolic (has no actual symbolic meaning).
When media is just data, it is possible to manipulate it in anyway by coding it, thus becoming a kind of abstract form, which I thought of as a sculptural material ready to be manipulated by algorithms. When thinking about the kinds of algorithms I would use to manipulate this data I was led by the idea of using standard data to process algorithms, which I learnt as a computer science student. These algorithms are fundamental and common to most software at some place in its code, even if only as a part of the operating system’s code. Therefore, the kinds of algorithms I chose were based on sorting and swapping data - either swapping data from one place in memory to another or sorting a sequence of data value in a sequence of memory. In the case of this series of sound installations, the memory and the data were simple digital sounds from noise or sine waves.

For example with SEPARATION I had four channels of sine waves in memory, and four channels of noise in memory. The software repeatedly played the sine wave’s data through an Analogue Digital Converter (ADC) (AMIGA 1200), while slowly applying processes, which swapped data from the memory that represented the noise to (using a relatively equal position) the memory that represented the sine waves. There were 4 separate processes that acted at different speeds. The result was the slow transition of sine waves to noise, for each of the 4 channels. When a channel was completely replaced with noise the process would reverse and swap back the data to the sine wave. The order of the swapping of memory locations was a random order. Sine waves would dissolve to noise and rhythmic patterns of noise would appear as samples looped, and then also dissolve into longer segments of noise.
When used for installations I had the monitor of the Amiga changing colour depending on the amount of swapping or sorting that had been performed. This was a straight foreword mapping to RGB values.