REHEARSING SILENCE:
Speculative prototype for a binaurally immersive medical portraiture
(9 minute audio loop)
For best results, listen on noise-cancelling headphones.
Rehearsing Silence is part audio essay, part medical portraiture, part data sonification, part prosthetic design sketch. It proposes a binaurally-encoded, audio-based approach to portraiture that frames and compresses the gradual and inevitable diminishment of auditory perception as a consequence of aging and neurologically collapsing bodies. This design sketch stems, in part, from ongoing research focused on developing instruments and tools to support multi-sensory (non-visual) data analytics, and a continuing interest in how the effects of aging and sensory impairment manifest themselves as perceptual artifacts within an artistic practice (Claude Monet painted through cataracts, Beethoven composed through tinnitus, etc.).
It also proposes an alternative approach to data sonification in which data is represented as absences, mutations, disfigurements or erasures of a previously whole or intact sonorous entity.
**PLEASE NOTE**
This audio portrait contains simulations of high frequency tinnitus tones and frequency-based hearing loss which are different in each ear. If you currently suffer from tinnitus, listening to this portrait may exacerbate your symptoms if listened to at high volume levels.**
Further Reading:
Begault, Durand R. “The Virtual Reality of 3-D Sound.” In Cyberarts, edited by Linda Jacobson, 79-87. San Francisco: Miller Freeman, 1992.
Eggermont, Jos J. Tinnitus. Springer, 2012.
Gruener, Anna. “The Effect of Cataracts and Cataract Surgery on Claude Monet.” The British Journal of General Practice 65.634 (2015): 254–255. PMC. Web. 1 Feb. 2018.
Lupton, Deborah. The Quantified Self : A Sociology of Self-Tracking. Polity Press, 2016.
Marmor MF. “Ophthalmology and Art: Simulation of Monet’s Cataracts and Degas’ Retinal Disease.” Arch Ophthalmol. 2006;124(12):1764–1769. doi:10.1001/archopht. 124.12.1764
Mermikides, Alex et al. Performance and the Medical Body. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016.
van Beethoven, Ludwig, and Paul Lewis. “Beethoven No. 3: Sonatas Op. 2, 7, 26, 27 ‘Moonlight’, 54, 57 ‘Appassionata’” (2005), Harmonia Mundi.
Additional field recordings by https://freesound.org/people/micndom/sounds/27340/
Related post: Sonification sketchbook: A sonification model based on variations or mutations of single sound objects?
Richard C. Windeyer 