Australian Music Centre | Breaking sound barriers

Event Details

Garth Paine present his artistic residency project in the context of residencies Ircam and ZKM.

Future Perfect: An immersive 3D audiovisual performance and installation work

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Future Perfect and EcoRift are VR (virtual reality) works by Garth Paine. In this talk Paine will discuss the experience of place within VR and his development of ambisonic tools for Unity 3D. He will outline his current collaboration with IRCAM/ZKM on a new 360 immersive concert work, Future Perfect, which will use personal smart phones to provide a virtual reality image space supported by 7th order Ambisonic and wave field synthesis soundfields. The Ambisonic audio will provide a richly detailed ambient soundscape whist the WFS will permit sounds to follow and be passed between individuals in the performance space.

Smart phone tracking systems will allow communal exchange within the virtual performance world, permitting sounds to be exchanged and vector lines to be drawn between individuals moving at similar speeds in similar directions or within certain distance thresholds. Centroids of mass movement patterns will be utilised as an interactive input in both realtime sound synthesis and image manipulation. The Future Sonic experience draws on gaming paradigms including exploration and discovery. 

Future Perfect explores the seam between virtual reality as a documentation format for environmental research and archiving nature, with the idea that 'nature' as we know it may, in the near future, only exist in virtual reality archives, and the notion of the virtual, a hyper-real imaginative world contained by a technological mediation, presenting that world to the individual as a private experience.

The performance will not have a fixed Point of View, with interactive crowd mapping determine communal navigation and viewing and listening perspectives individualised to the viewers location.

On the other hand, EcoRift focuses on bringing the national parks of SW America into hospitals, schools and homes of people across the globe. Democratising access whilst also augmenting social impact of these magnificent environments through applications in wellbeing, post surgery recovery and education, The EcoRift application seeks to help individuals feel at peace, actively listening to natural environments. Ambisonic field recordings provide 3D sound, featuring dynamic spatial cues which play a large part in making the user feel immersed and located in the landscape being viewed. Initial experiments indicate immediate impact on stress, tension and breathing patterns with longer term studies underway, examining the benefit of repeated exposure over months and years on wellbeing and wellness of aged and opioid addicted populations. 

This talk will be accompanied by a demonstration installation where several VR headsets will be available showing both works in addition to a 360VR recording of Monteverdi Vespers performed by the Tenet ensemble, recorded in NYC by the author in late 2016. 

Further information for this event is available online at the event's website

Featured artists

• Music of Garth Paine