Sound Spheres

Sound Spheres

Sound Spheres experiments with the intertwingled potentialities of hypertext, as an information system, and sound(s), as a basis for non-linear storytelling. Through its combination of digital media, interactivity, and sound(s), Sound Spheres explores storytelling as a sense-making mechanic. Participants use sounds carried in multiple, colored spheres moving about the screen space to create and consider narratives that are both linear and serendipitous. The creative research associated with Sound Spheres seeks to explore new modes and methods of storytelling where sound is a fundamental component.

EXPERIENCE Sound Spheres

Exhibitions

Hypertext 2023, ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media
Bibliotheca Hertziana
Max Planck Institut for Art History, Rome, Italy
4-8 September 2023

ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media
Juried exhibition, international
Institute of Information Systems
Hof University, Hof, Germany
17-20 September 2019
Event website

Sound Spheres was jury-selected as one of eight works included in the exhibition/creative track associated with the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Hypertext 2019 Conference. The conference theme "Hypertext—Tear Down the Wall," sought to unite different hypertext research directions and communities and celebrate the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Held in partnership with the ACM Document Engineering Conference, in Berlin, 16-23 September. The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is the world's largest computing society. It's mission is to raise awareness of computing's important technical, educational, and social issues around the world.

Sound Spheres Electronic Literature Organization 2019 Conference Media Art Festival
Juried exhibition, international
The Lewis Glucksman Gallery
University College Cork, Ireland
15-17 July 2019
Exhibition program
Exhibition website

Sound Spheres was jury-selected as one of twenty-four works included in the Media Art Festival associated with the Electronic Literature Organization 2019 conference. The curatorial theme of this exhibition was "Peripheries: Electronic Literature and New Media Art." The Lewis Glucksman Gallery is prestigious national institution of the contemporary arts. The Electronic Literature Organization is an international organization dedicated to the investigation of literature produced for the digital medium.

Sound Spheres International Conference for Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS)
Juried exhibition, international
Studio 2, Science Building
Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland
5-8 December 2018
Event website
My work at festival website

Sound Spheres was jury-selected for inclusion in the Art Festival associated with the International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling 2018 conference. The curatorial theme of this exhibition was the combination of digital media and non-human sound sources for interactive storytelling. Dedicated festival webpage.

ICIDS is the premier conference for researchers and practitioners concerned with studying digital interactive forms of narrative from a variety of perspectives, including the theoretical, technological, and applied design practices. The annual conference is an interdisciplinary gathering that combines technology-focused approaches with humanities-inspired theoretical inquiry, empirical research, and artistic expression. ICIDS Conference website.

Background

I created Sound Spheres as an experiment with the intertwingled potentialities of hypertext and hypermedia as information systems, and sound(s), as the basis for non-linear storytelling.

Specifically, Sound Spheres focuses on two research-practice goals. First, it combines computational digital media and storytelling techne with which participants can create interactive, participatory sound-based narratives. Second, Sound Spheres experiments with hypertext, using sound(s) rather than text as links. Through both active and passive listening practices, users are asked to consider non-linear narratives connected through sound(s), created and accessed through participation. The links are the associations one makes in listening.

The experience begins with an interface visualizing a night-time city skyline. Atop one building is an antenna mast. Three seconds after activation of the interface, this antenna broadcasts eight colored spheres. Thirty three seconds later is the second broadcast of eight more colored spheres, followed at seventy eight seconds by the third, and final, broadcast of another eight sound spheres.

These spheres circulate above the city skyline, rebounding from the monitor's edges. Each sphere carries a unique audio sample. Participants may listen to these samples, and construct stories using multiple interactive approaches.

First, by moving the cursor to intersect the trajectories of the sound spheres, participants can hear the audio samples they carry. The cursor is a listening device.

Second, participants can position the cursor anywhere on the screen, and wait for sound spheres to pass within its range of hearing. As sound spheres approach the cursor, they glow and their audio contents are heard.

Finally, participants can click sound spheres, moving them into an audio player embedded in the building skyline. Up to five spheres at a time can be placed in the audio player. Once in the player, the sound spheres can be heard in the order they were selected. Participants can stop and restart the audio narrative as they wish. And, they can, at any time, eject any sound sphere from the player.

In these ways, participants can create serendipitous linear narratives based on interactivity and narrative elements provided by the selected sound spheres.

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Intertwingeld

Intertwingled is a term proposed by Theodor Holm "Ted" Nelson (1937- ), American pioneer of information and technology, to express the deeply complex and interrelated nature of human knowledge. "Everything is deeply intertwingled," he said. "In an important sense there are no 'subjects' at all; there is only all knowledge, since the cross-connections among the myriad topics of this world simply cannot be divided up neatly" (Computer Lib: You Can and Must Understand Computers Now / Dream Machines: New Freedoms through Computer Screens—A Minority Report. South Bend: the distributors, 1972, p. DM45. ISBN 0-89347-002-3).

In a revised edition, Nelson added this statement: "Hierarchical and sequential structures, especially popular since Gutenberg, are usually forced and artificial. Intertwingularity is not generally acknowledged—people keep pretending they can make things hierarchical, categorizable and sequential when they can't" (rev.ed, Redmund, WA: Tempus Books of Microsoft Press, 1987, p. DM37).

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Hypertext

Hypertext is text displayed on electronic devices that allows access to other text through hyperlinks (or "links"). Links are specially coded and are most often displayed as blue, underlined text, that, when clicked or tapped, help us navigate complex information structures to find information we want or need. This information can be either static (prepared/stored in advance) or dynamic (created in response to user query), and be be either fully or partially presented.

Theodor Holm "Ted" Nelson (1937- ) coined the term hypertext in 1963, partially inspired by As We May Think, a 1945 essay by Vannevar Bush, who described a hypothetical device, the MEMEX (MEMory EXtender), based on reels of microfilm, that allowed users to link documents into a "trail" or related information. Using these links, users could scroll between linked information as if they were scrolling a single reel of microfilm. This approach, according to Bush, followed human associative thinking (one idea leads to another, and another) and provided a way of navigating through large bodies of knowledge.

Nelson introduced the term hypertext in a paper delivered at the 1965 Association for Computing Machinery conference (Complex Information Processing: A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing and the Indeterminate. ACM '65 Proceedings of the 1965 20th national conference, 1965, pp. 84-100. DOI: 0.1145/800197.806036). The most notable presentation of hypertext is the World Wide Web, released in 1991.

For Nelson, hypertext was non-sequential writing, chunks of text connected by links. Hypertext could model complexity in textual connections that linearity and hierarchy could not. One use described by Nelson was to track the mechanisms of authorial provenance, and to provide micropayments to authors whenever their writing was used or referred to by others. Nelson detailed his thinking in Computer Lib: You Can and Must Understand Computers Now / Dream Machines: New Freedoms through Computer Screens—A Minority Report, two books combined between the same covers. One finished with one book, then flipped the book over to read the second. First published in 1972 (South Bend: the distributors. ISBN 0-89347-002-3), the book was revised in 1987 (Redmund, WA: Tempus Books of Microsoft Press).

Nelson's The Xanadu Project (An Overview on "The Future of Information"), first conceived in 1960 as a world-wide repository for electronic publications, and updated several times since, builds on Bush's concept of "trails" (Nelson calls them "links") and anticipates the coming of hypertext, as well as its use in providing access to information.

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Hypermedia

Hypermedia was first used in 1963 by Theodor Holm "Ted" Nelson (1937- ) to signify tables, images, and other forms of information presentation that could be connected in branching and responding ways, like hypertext. Nelson said hypermedia extends the idea and use of hypertext.

Nelson introduced the term hypermedia in a paper delivered at the 1965 Association for Computing Machinery conference (Complex Information Processing: A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing and the Indeterminate. ACM '65 Proceedings of the 1965 20th national conference, 1965, pp. 84-100. DOI: 0.1145/800197.806036).

Metadata

Title: Sound Spheres
Object: Audio file
Format: MP3, 320kbs
Creators: John Barber and Greg Philbrook
Creation date: 2018
Original/Edited Files Available: Yes
Rights and Status: Copyrighted, all rights reserved. Available for broadcast, installation, exhibition, and/or publication with permission.
Source: Field recordings, manipulated audio
Image: Created by Greg Philbrook
Original/Edited Files Available: Yes

Artist Statement

Sound Spheres encourages users to create and consider serendipitous, non-linear sound-based narratives through interactions with different colored spheres, each carrying a different sound.

The interface is purposefully game-like, to encourage participants to explore the narrative contents held in each of the colored spheres. It is also challenging as these spheres are constantly moving. How to create narratives in this moving/changing context is one of the questions explored by Sound Spheres.

Another question is the nature of narrative itself. Using this interface, can participants dip in and out of ongoing, continuous potential narratives by "listening" to the surrounding sounds?

And what of these sounds? Do they have to be known, identifiable sounds, or might they be acousmatic, sounds heard but their sources unseen?

Sound Spheres answers both questions affirmatively. Within this work, engaging narratives do not necessarily require definitive beginnings, middles, or ends. Nor do they require linear arrangement. Instead, narratives are ongoing, constantly changing, rearranging themselves, depending on to what we listen, and how. Narratives create worlds, sounds create ways to be in those worlds. Through its visualization of narrative components, and invitations to participate and/or interact, Sound Spheres points us toward the listener's imagination as the glue cementing components of interactive digital storytelling into satisfying and fullfiling narratives.