(Leave) No Trace at Haverford College October 2021
For the month of October SMC had a residence in the VCAM 006 Create Space, building a playful interactive sound room that triggered exploration of corporeal reality and its engagement with nature. This residency also included a workshop for students on Teensy, Teenyduino, Midi Controllers, Max MSP and soldering. There was a Student Viewing on October 26th and a Public Viewing on October 29th.
SMC built an interactive sound room by using photoresistors and force pressure sensors in a dark room to trigger sounds of natural disasters through out the room. The data from the sensors ran into a Teensy module which then ran through a patch made in Max MSP. In the middle of the space was an 8 foot tall sound proof room. Inside participants could record blurts of vocalizations that then ran through a teensy and max msp, and were looped and reverberated into the hallway outside the space.
(Leave No) Trace Room
“Temporary acoustic communities can aid us in understanding the continuity between bodies and the environment and connect to geotrauma in a restorative manner by disentangling our situated and embodied stories while connecting to places under distress” - A Sonic Anthropocene. Sound Practices in a Changing Environment by Ivo Louro, Margardia Mendes, Daniel Paiva E Iñigo Sánchez-Fuarros
We at Sound Museum Collective have long been interested in the practice of Deep Listening by Pauline Oliveros and recognize it as an intersectional tool that can be used to reinterpret materiality and space.
The inspiration of this interactive sound room is derived from a passion for unique technologies and innovative ways of experiencing sound, ones that reshape our relationships to our soundscapes and the world of audio engineering.
But it goes deeper than that. As we enter Scorpio season, approaching not only a literal dark time of the year but also a future in which we will need to adapt to intense climate-disaster interruptions, a time when many draw the Hermit card from their tarot decks and begin an introspective retreat inward- we find ourselves searching for triggers to remind us of our corporeal reality.
Sound is most certainly a mediator between the body and living environment. At a time when dissociation has become a popular coping mechanism, and more often than not our digital lives run the gambit, we use natural sounds to connect us to our physical world.
There is also a recognition, an homage to the ways in which our corporeal existence also affects the sounds of nature.
(Leave No) Trace Room was created by Jackie Milestone, Elissa Fredeen, Gladys Harlow, Noah JC, Juliette Rando, Will Fosset & RJ McGhee
Special Thanks to Haverford College & VCAM, James Weissinger, Kent Watson, Max for the Interface, Savan DePaul for the cables, Joshua Moses & Students, and Matt O’Hare