Iñaki Ramirez

Sonance Control – Eagle Wharf Gallery 13/6/2023

Sonance Control is an interactive sound installation, that uses speech recognition technology to trigger and sequence events in a quadrophonic sound composition. It seeks to explore performance through aural communication, extending the voice not as an instrument but as an interface, in order to achieve new states of immersion.

It consist of a quadraphonic sound system with a command terminal (the projected screen) and a microphone. The system has a list of commands that when spoken to the microphone, the composition changes depending on the command said. The composition can be manipulated in various forms, from muting specific speakers and changing the panning of the piece, to randomising the sonic material. The idea of this project was to create a sound system that could be used as an instrument, and that it can only be interacted with by using the voice. I was deeply inspired by François Bayle Acousmonium, and the sound art practice of Sound Diffusion.

The following image is from the command list used in the installation. It comes with a small description of what each command does.

As well the installation has a terminal that visualises the commands to the audience. It is used to let the audience know what commands are active. The following image show the GUI of the terminal. The text in the middle of the page is the speech detected, as that text is not a command in the installation the text Command Not Found pops up. The black squares represent the four speakers in the system, as seen in the image below they’re all coloured black meaning that they’re currently muted.

In the image below you can see how the command was detected, changing each square colour into white indicating that playback is enabled.

Technically the installation used three pieces of software. First a JavaScript website that uses the inbuilt web speech recognition tool, this website also creates all the graphics seen in the terminal. Then all the audio manipulation was done in Max MSP, that is triggered by the website. And finally I created a node.js app that bridges the web socket of the website to Max MSP.

The Synthetic Garden – Gallery 46 29/1/2022

The Synthetic Garden is the title of my debuting installation, exhibited in the garden of Gallery 46. My installation was exhibited alongside various pieces by fellow sound artists, for the event With Realistic Sound, organised by LCC BA2 Sound Art students.

The sound installation consists of a generative quadrophonic composition played from four speakers placed in opposite corners of the garden. The speakers are hidden under the scrubs with the purpose of creating an acousmatic effect in the listener. The composition features field recordings that are being re-contextualized by granular synthesis, later modulated by algorithmic modulation, evolving and progressing in a generative manner. Creating a synthetic ecology in which the natural soundscape coexists with digitally manipulated recordings. I used Supercollider as the main tool in the creation of this composition. To adapt it to the four speaker array in the garden I used a Raspberry PI to run the script and send the output to each designated speaker.

Human advances in computational technology has raised new questions in the conflict of defining reality, bringing to the table concepts such as the simulation theory. For my piece I wanted to explore the conflict of reality in context with the recent and contemporary hybridisation of analogue and digital life, using sound design as my main medium of expression. My objective was to create a space where digital sound synthesis and natural sound environments merge into one ecology.

Binaural Recording