Soundings

• Alan Dunning
• alan@degreezero.org
• Independent Artist, Victoria, Canada

Keywords: Voice Recognition, Speaking in Tongues, Apophenia, Pyschogeography.

Soundings (2020) is a work that looks for patterns in our everyday world to explore how shifting signs can change our sense of the nature of a space and how it is and might be occupied. It is an installation that uses the discrepancies and limitations of pattern recognition systems to generate instances of speech-like objects and events and to present these so as to reshape the psychological dimensions and sense of a space.

The installation consists of texts shown on several programmable LED signs — to present a flickering poetic babble reminiscent of a speaking in tongues, or the mysteries of numbers stations — radio broadcasts of strings of spoken numbers and text, and fragments of music. Audio is captured and analyzed to generate texts in real time, drawn directly from the sounds gathered at listening posts set up in specific spaces. LED screens show real time video of four views showing the direction of the directional microphones used to gather sound. For this particular version of the installation four listening posts are situated on opposing sides of the artist’s residence facing North, South, East and West.

The property is relatively isolated, situated on a hill and surrounded by trees. Predominant sounds are of wind, birdsong, animal activity, the movement of trees and bushes, the running water of a nearby pond and distant human activity.

The proposed project has grown out of earlier work that used pattern recognition to reveal images and forms in random or ambient noise or to change our sense of place. One explored inaccessible or unseen spaces in urban environments discovering some of the coexisting yet unnoticed environments and ecologies hidden within the fabric of our cities, using small diameter snake cameras and tiny microphones. Other work used ideas found in Electronic Video Phenomena to explore ideas about felt presence/absence using visual and audio noise that was analyzed by computers searching for patterns that looked like human faces or sounded like speech - on occasion finding faces and voices that were convincing, unsettling, and disturbingly present.

This project explores means and ways to analyze ambient noise and suggest a new psychological topography to re-imagine and re-make a place through the perception of the most ordinary places as poetically exciting, uncanny, and even supernatural. The results are speech-like fragments, looking and sounding like gibberish, but uncannily and disturbingly suggestive of meaning and structure. It uses the deficiencies of pattern recognition software, and the human tendencies to see apophenic and pareidolic patterns and connections as a way to generate new meanings in the landscape to suggest the existence of unexpected alternative realities through the lenses of the misheard, the half-heard and the imagined to conceive alternative realities.