Graduation Project

Forward/Introduction

In my fine art practice I have been exploring how I am, as a human being, conscious to my surroundings. I discovered sound as my primary medium to explore this theme. In my last work, I made work on our perception to sounds around us and how they affect our consciousness. I used sampling techniques to found sounds and field recordings. From this I want to further develop this topic, learning sound synthesis more in depth to actually engaging myself to produce sound from pure electric voltage, either in analogue or digital way. I want to research on sound synthesis process and how they could be merged into meditation practice.

Central Question

My research topic is on sound synthesis as a meditation practice, coming from psychoacoustics which is about how sound affects our consciousness. As meditation is achieved from an immersive physical behaviour, such as focusing on listening, breathing, body movement, I explore the relationship between physical interaction and mental state. Pattern-based, repetition, development, real-time interaction
Relationship between immersive behaviour and meditation? Body movement within physical space towards mind meditation. How can physical interaction control a mental state by means of sound?

Relevance of the Topic

It is universally acknowledged that sound, or music affects human emotion and mental state in various ways. This includes psychological effect on our brain with physical In my work I have been exploring the theme of human consciousness, awareness of our being in the environment. Therefor Especially people nowadays are losing focus from digital revolution. However, the technology also changed the way we listen to music and perceive the sound. mind-body/digital-analogue
Sound as a mean for meditation has been explored quite far on minimal music movement. Artist, musicians like La Monte Young, Steve Reich, explored drone music, etc. Since sound is the most bodily sense for me, engaging oneself not only listening, but also to produce sound is physical activity (like playing the instrument), which can bring you another state of mind. Especially nowadays in this technology age, people are losing focus and struggling to be mindful to the present. Meditation and mindfulness became new media phenomena in contemporary digital media culture, when in fact they originated from ancient time Buddhist and spiritual traditions. Technological development brought us new kind of consciousness, therefore we need to accept new media technology as our tool, in the age of cyborg.

control environment, physical interaction, change of environment > cognitive, perception effect of repetition? what each sound effect evokes to our emotion?

Hypothesis

repetition affects consciousness > memory process, perception, immersion, mindfulness, meditation low frequency, how frequency > physical effect physical interaction with surrounding/environment

Research Approach

Reference/Source Research

=La Monte Young

Sustained drone sound, music as medium to understand how the world works

Caterina Barbieri

Modular synthesiser, Pattern-based sequencer, repetition, synthesis exploration, ecstatic melody

Lorenzo Senni

Supersaw, Trance, Repetition of a phase for a whole track

Field Research

iii

Key References

Psychoacoustics

Psychoacoustics is the scientific study of sound perception and audiology – how humans perceive various sounds. More specifically, it is the branch of science studying the psychological and physiological responses associated with sound (including noise, speech and music). It can be further categorized as a branch of psychophysics. Psychoacoustics received its name from a field within psychology—i.e., recognition science—which deals with all kinds of human perceptions. It is an interdisciplinary field of many areas, including psychology, acoustics, electronic engineering, physics, biology, physiology, and computer science.[1]

Experiments

Microphone input in Pure Data -> translate to oscillator/vocoder
connect physical/analogue input to digital synthesis module in Pure Data

Insights from Experimentation

(what have you pulled from your hands on practice based research?)

Artistic/Design Principles

(what is your own criteria for designing?)

Artistic/Design Proposal

(what do you propose to make)

I want to make an interactive sound installation. It is a meditative room with interface of playing modules of digital synthesiser via Pure Data. The room itself plays the role of instrument and each modules will be triggered by different physical input/movement. It is about controlling your mind/thoughts, therefore the interface should be intuitive enough, or has an instruction to be able for audiences to play with their surrounding with awareness. The first gate is microphone, which people make sound of their own. This will be transferred to oscillator which transform the sound to sound wave with its own waveform, pitch, duration, and this will be sequenced (repeated). There will be an ADSR module, which controls the characteristic of the sound (attack, decay, sustain, release). Other effect modules such as reverb, delay, distortion will be triggered/controlled by different movement/different part of the room.

Realised work

(what did you actually make)

Final Conclusions

(what was the point? what do you take away?)

Bibliography

(what did you reference in this text (other texts, images, films, exhibitions)? Remember to use proper in-text citing!!!!!!!!!!