Fields of Sound
Dorota Blaszczak
Wednesday 22 November — Listening Session
19:00–20:45
“Fields of Sound” is a generative sound installation (with an animated score), based on my algorithm for creating various sound timelapses out of over thousand recordings from Wrocław Irrigation Fields in Poland, in 2022. Several days of each month were recorded (by Daniel Brożek) using autonomous recorder starting in January 2022. All the sound files were analyzed to retrieve ecoacoustic indices for each five minutes of recordings and to detect sound clusters spread over recorded days.
Soundscape re-listening, informed by the results of analysis, allows us to discover maps of similar sound events, to compare the same hour through several days, or to perceive the whole day in few minutes. An animated score in form of “field of sound” of one month is created using false color images. Each horizontal line represents 24 hours as if sounds were planted on day timeline to grow with color of its data but only if listened to. This forms a trace of history of listening as a score of performance.
Ecoacoustics with its tools for algorithmic analyzing large sets of audio recordings, can change the scale of time and move us beyond our anthropocentric perspective.
“Fields of Sound” was created as part of the Canti Spazializzati series (2022).
Bio
Dorota Błaszczak is an audio engineer at the Polish Radio Archives in Warsaw and an assistant professor on the Sound Engineering Department of the Chopin University of Music in Warsaw. She leads courses in interactive sound, works in sound restoration and preservation, creates interactive and generative projects (e.g. Waves of Remembrance: Wrocław in Radio Sounds (2016), Daily Data Orchestra (2019), Fields of Sound (2022)) and audio works (e.g. Augmented Radio Listening (2017), Inherited Sounds (2019), Trying to Hear a Tree Falling in the Forest (2020)). She has been sound designer for virtual reality projects in Canada, at the Banff Centre for the Arts, Softimage and Immersence (e.g. Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun’s Inherent Rights, Vision Rights (1992), Perry Hoberman’s Bar Code Hotel (1993), Char Davies’s Osmose (1995) and Ephemere (1998, remastered 2022)). She also designed the sound for early computer games.
