If ever you decide to demonstrate your crazy, arcane research, the ideas you dream about and discuss with yourself, sometimes inadvertently aloud – then find you\u2019ve accidentally instigated the biggest, most exciting and terrifying project of your life, don\u2019t call me to complain. I will only laugh.<\/p>\n
I was working on how to motion-track listeners so they can walk inside a piece of music – we\u2019re getting there, with amazing work from composer-programmer Iyad Assaf<\/a>, it\u2019s called 3D-BARE<\/a>.<\/p>\n I called music tech guru and composer Julio d\u2019Escrivan for advice.<\/p>\n He put me in touch with Enrique Tomas, whose noTours software uses GPS and does a similar – well, different – thing to what I was working on but with such interesting results and rich possibilities that I was hooked.<\/p>\n noTours<\/a> lets you edit a place with sounds: overlapped, interlocking, spliced, hovering in the landscape.<\/p>\n When a composition is complete, I now do something additional with it – splitting it into horizontal and vertical fragments, spreading it across a garden or along the Thames, then inviting people to come and listen.<\/p>\n I recorded singers a few months ago, one at a time, then combined them into a \u2018virtual\u2019 choir, in a setting of a poem called \u201cTake Me By The Hand\u201d<\/a> for Southampton\u2019s Musical Alphabet weekend.<\/p>\n There\u2019s now a version spread between the paths and trees, buildings and water of the university campus. Singers and the place, sonically and physically bound together. Blurring and augmenting the heard reality of a place allows us to do strange and interesting things\u2026<\/p>\n So I’ve been constructing musical compositions embedded in landscape and decided to make more systematic my approach to recording the landscape itself and, more importantly, the people in it.<\/p>\n Six months on, I\u2019m coordinating the Audio Portrait of Southampton – to capture the place, the year, its noises, sounds and music. An immersive sonic montage spread across the green spaces of the city for listeners to walk inside and investigate, like a virtual city built only of sound.<\/p>\n Southampton\u2019s Youth Orchestras<\/a> and Art Asia<\/a> have recently come on board, bringing\u00a0 fantastic, diverse musical talent to the Portrait and we\u2019ve just had a fantastic plug from Xan Philips on Voice FM<\/a>.<\/p>\n