Space and Place
Residency and Exhibition
April 2016
The Residency
Left Bank Leeds had advertised for artists and practitioners to apply for a funded project where four people would be selected to be artists in residence for ten days, produce work which would then be shown during an exhibition within the building. Click here for exhibition flyer
The title 'Space and Place' fitted my own research perfectly, so I applied and outlined my current research, and what I would do during a ten day period. The artists who were selected came from a diverse range of experience and disciplines, but within an hour of meeting each other we all realised we had lots in common. We were all keen to collaborate - at least in terms of discussing each others' ideas and work if not actually getting involved with creating work.
Left Bank
The inside of the building is really beautiful, and much bigger than expected from the modest entrance. During the residency I wanted to explore the different perspectives of the building, and I started to plan how I might be able to bring some of the less accessible areas to life by using sound.
Paulette and Annette Morris performing at the opening night
Over the course of the residency, I wrote a series of pieces exploring the notion of space and place. Of the three works exhibited, 'Open Spaces' was written in response to meeting some of the people who use Left Bank, as well as the history of the building as both a place for worship and community.
I collected many sounds from around the site (usually at night when it was quiet). I used these for a found sound montage to be played on the opening night. I used the mixing desk to specialise the sounds through the eight speakers I had arranged in two sets. One was a quad arrangement at each corner of the room. The other was a vertical ring at the altar end of the building. This allowed sounds to be panned above the visitors, although it was not easy to do this smoothly with auxiliary bus sends.
The recording presented below is a ‘virtual performance’ of the spatialisation I achieved on the opening night. I found the original 1st Order B-Format recording lacked spatial detail so I decided to make a mix using 2nd Order panners. The reverberation was captured using a 1st Order microphone and the impulse responses were created using a Sine Sweep method to allow an optimum signal to noise ratio. Using the Soundfield tetrahedral microphone as inspration, I placed a Genelec 8050 monitor speaker at each of the capsule positions (front-left up, front-right down, back-left down, and back-right up). By converting the panning back in to A-format I was able to convolve the sounds with the appropriate impulse response before conversion back into B-format. This 1st Order signal is then blended with the 2nd Order dry signal. The workflow (achieved in Reaper) is shown below.
The Ambisonic version was converted to Binaural and is available below: