LiveScape

The installation uses the associative capability of the temporal lobe of the human brain to render a visual environment of the city through sounds, generated by the installation.

Using a custom built object-based surround sound engine, the installation is able to generate moving sounds in realtime, giving the listener a sense of three-dimensionality in the room that the listener is standing in.

The installation plays with the concept of an online collective "memory" of a place and lets users experience this through audio sequences that are generated by real-world data.

LiveScape is a dynamically generating 3D sound system that re-creates the city of Rotterdam, solely from data that is already available online.

Graduation Project from Sjoerd Legué
Willem de Kooning Academy, Rotterdam (NL)

Datasets and Generative Design

The audio files and datasets that are used in this installation are gathered from several sources that publish these kinds of data in the open domain of the world wide web (i.e. FreeSound Foundation, ArcGIS, Rotterdam Open Data).

Because of the generative nature of the sound engine, no two audio sequences are generated exactly the same. Following the rules of the non-simulated world where a real location also does not sound the same when you visit it again.

Auditory Cognition

The concept of using audio as a medium to re-create a physical space originates from my personal association to sounds and memories.

I discovered at around the age of 15 that I had to wear glasses, which is quite late. Because of this, my strongest memories of my childhood are not visual but rather in sounds or smells. And even though I currently wear glasses, I still have a stronger memorative association with sounds and smells than with sight.

Code vs. Memories

An abstract observation within the LiveScape project are the contradicting principles of these simulated spaces and the simulation of a memory in the human brain. The idea that a "memory" of a physical place is stored and played in such a generative way is similar to the way human memories function within our brains.

As how a single place never sounds exactly the same, a specific memory in our brain is also never experienced the same way. Every time you recollect a memory of a moment, think about it and store it back in your long time memory, the memory fades.

The sounds used in this installation are not recorded by me personally but by other people over a varying stretch of time. Therefore you could say that the installation is an online collective "memory" of a small region, rather than an exact point in space.

The purpose of the installation is to let listeners experience a dynamically generated three-dimensional "memory" of a real-world space in Rotterdam.