‘Soundframes' is the result of a research carried over the summer of 2004 in Monfalcone, Italy, commissioned by the local town administration for the annual 'Extramoenia' art exhibition.

The author, after some listening sessions, chose five places where to put the ‘Soundframes’: 'listening points', simply suggesting to listen to the urban soundscape with a different attitude and concentration. These places have been marked with a graphic pattern on streets, rocks, avenues. The listeners have been asked to try to discover and to listen to the soundscape of that part of the town and to be part of it.

The perception and the elaboration of sound and noises coming from the natural and industrial soundscape of the town are the creative material using which the author has then built his own vision of the ‘Soundframes’.

The author recorded with a binaural system the soundscape of the 5 different places and then used the field recordings to perform live an original composition.

At the end of the exhibition, the author performed in real time with the sounds of the five soundframes, composing a virtual moving soundscape using a multichannel system and a patch written in Max/Msp using lloopp. VBAP (Monfalcone) and Ambisonics (Trieste) have been used to diffuse the sound over a 8 speaker system.

Soundframes premiered in Monfalcone as part of the Extramoenia5 / models for urban space exhibition, curated by Majda Japelj and Laura Safred in the months of June/July 2004.

A subsequent installation was carried out on behalf of the Nordio Art Institute of Trieste in November 2005, at the end of a course held by the author on 'Sound landscapes' for the students of the institute itself.

Best listening experience is achieved using headphones.








References

R. Murray Schafer, “The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World”, Destiny Books, 1993

Albert Mayr, “Musica e suoni dell’ambiente”, CLUEB, 2001

Barry Truax, “Soundscape, Acoustic Communication and Environmental Sound Composition”, Contemporary Music Review, 15(1), 1996, pp. 49-65

Barry Truax (ed), Handbook for acoustic Ecology. The Music of Environment Series 5. Burnaby, 1978

Pulkki, V. (1997) "Virtual Sound Source Positioning Using Vector Base Amplitude Panning". Journal of the Audio Engineering Society 45 (6): 456-66.

Kendall, G. (1995) "The Decorrelation of Audio Signals and Its Impact on Spatial Imagery". Computer Music Journal 19 (4): 72-87.