The transit of sound and the perception of sonic phenomena
The title of the practical research, 'The Transit Of Sound And The Perception Of Sonic Phenomena', is an inquiry into the fundamental nature of our physical environment and how sound behaves as it passes through that environment. Art works have been produced as practical research for the study and attended by visitors who could experience vibration as the manifestation of the transit of sound through different materials: air, water and solid matter. I chose familiar settings for five of the artworks, such as sitting in a car, lying in the bath, or being in a house. I developed different ways that the visitors could engage with the works and aimed to build on the visitors’ experiences of these places; heightening their perception by revealing or suggesting previously unnoticed physical evidence of the transit of sound through materials other than air. The experience of this body of works has revealed that the central element throughout is the visitors’ own imagination. In the study I increasingly chose locations to explore that required the visitors’ imaginations: connecting locations that included both our expanded environment; the planet and outside the earth’s atmosphere, and our own internal environment of the body. The study provided experiences for the visitors in each of the different artworks where vibration, as the manifestation of the transit of sound through different material, informed them of the planet's physical properties as articulated through sound. The final artwork, 'You Are Here', uniquely placed the experiences in an environment whereby the visitors could go home and relate their experiences directly to the rooms of their own homes, bringing their thoughts and reflections of the planet and their relation to it ‘closer to home’.
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