Featured mediascaper: Duncan Speakman
“the idea of putting people in a real place seemed more exciting to me — just that bringing in that slight element of the unknown through the real world — I had used random elements in programming but that all seemed a bit boring — whereas there was so much going on in the real world — so working out how to bring that in to an audiences experience was more interesting”
Duncan is a sound artist who works with headphone based media. His journey into location relevant headphone based media began after he gave up being a musician who ran his own record label to study sound engineering at university. By the time he had finished studying he decided he really did not want to work in the music industry and had developed an interest in documentary for which he moved to Bristol to explore. As soon as he got to Bristol he felt home.
“…it's about when you come down the M32 and there's a point just as you get to IKEA when you have this view of the hills and you see Montpelier and Kingsdown and every time I see that I feel at home somehow”
Networking with other artists through places such as the Watershed and the Arnolfini made him realize that arts practice could give him the flexibility to combine his interests in sound, music and documentary. He began working on sound installations and interactive media but soon got frustrated with making work in gallery spaces. He began to experiment with installations in cafés and bars including a project called Schminky which I worked on with him. After a sojourn to Bridgewater to be the Engine Driver in a new community media center set up by Somerset Film and video he returned to Bristol and began his work on located mp3 tours. The excitement of working with real world elements and his love of the countryside drove his transition from gallery installation out onto the streets.
Performance walks.
After creating a number of audio walks Duncan added in a performance element to the experience.
“I realized I was sending out all these people on walks with headphones and the experience was really live in that things were happening all around them and I never knew what happened — I guess you could say I got jealous! I don't know what the experience is that they are going through so I wondered how I could control that experience more but still keep that real world element.”
He created audio walks where he would lead the audience round cities by using a radio transmitter to speak directly to the group who were wearing wireless headphones. He spoke live text and processed sounds to augment what they could actually hear. The experience was like listening to an mp3 guided walk but you could see someone in the distance, an aspect that he liked when he saw the Coppola film Conversation. In the film there is one shot when you see a distant town square but you can hear the conversation close up.
Converting mp3 tours to mscape.
With his wealth of experience in located story telling we approached Duncan and asked him to convert a couple of his existing sound walks into the mscape format. He found the process challenging and frustrating “the frustration was with knowing that the mp3 walks did not make the most of what mscape does. There wasn't the time to really completely tear them apart and rethink them — they felt like complete pieces”
When Duncan creates mp3 tours he works in a compositional way especially with the musical composition and the timing. He knows exactly how long each piece will be and so can build up crescendos and tension. If people walk at exactly the right speed and to the right place then the piece plays out exactly as designed, but if people take the wrong path, slow down or speed up then the experience goes wrong. mscape allowed Duncan to pull apart his pieces so that you were never in the wrong place at the wrong time but in pulling it apart it was hard to maintain the dynamics. To overcome this Duncan used two techniques, he created shorter timed sequences that would trigger from certain key points such as a corner or a shop front. He also used a technique from film called stem mixes so that sound levels would be consistent and controllable within mscape.
“in film you take all your say weather sound effects and you mix all the tracks down to one — so they are all compressed and they sound right and they do all their independent level changes together and that is called a stem — and you might have a voice stem, a weather stem and a music stem and so that is how I tended to work on the conversions. I took the full mix and broke it down into stems — and then the mscape is triggering off individual stems at any one time.”
He also found that he had to do more coding than he expected because “on an mp3 walk it does not matter that you go back the way you came — but if that is marked out with GPS then it has to know that you have been there before and what you did and whether it was the first time and that kind of thing so what seemed a pretty simple linear route turned out to be slightly more complex”.
Both of Duncan's anchored sound walks “There's Dirty Weather in Watchet” and “Feelings are always local” are available to download from the site.
Creating a portable walk
We then set Duncan the seemingly impossible task of making a walk which could be taken anywhere in the world but would still be relevant to the surroundings. After much musing he came up with the idea of creating a story which connected your surroundings with other places. He also wanted to create something that was meaningful and his early ideas were around war zones, land mine dispersal and border patrols before finally settling on climate change as an underlying topic. As part of his investigation he also collected lots of stories from all over the world of peoples stories, different places and different countries but none of those got used in the resulting piece. As this was a completely new piece he approached the design with mscape in mind knowing that whatever he created needed to be flexible and event triggered rather than timed. The design process was split into two parallel tasks the technical experimentation and development and the theme, story and musical development. Technically he worked out how he could use mscape to place a series of concentric circles so that whichever way the user walked they would hear successive layers of the story line. He also experimented with sound mixes and controls so that he could for example fade down background sounds when narrative was being spoken.
“it was a lot of playing around with compositional structures that the mscape would let me do — it felt like when I first started working with electronics, drum machines four tracks — that kind of thing — and you are using these machines that were made in the late 80s and you are really pushing them because they don't do that much but they are kind of great so you really see what you can do and you experiment with them”
Once the technical side was proven he concentrated on the content development.
“I did a lot of playing around with walking around town with my ipod playing different pieces of music and sound to see which ones let me hear everything else and which ones let me hear what else was going on and when I found ones that really worked I do a spectrogram on them to find out what frequencies were in them I then use those to make my mixes essentially. I also started to think about generative music”
To make the walk portable the user needed to mark where they were in the world to lay down the concentric story circles. Duncan wanted this act to feel as if it was part of the narrative and not a mechanism just to get GPS to work. He wove the story line around searching for particular things in the environment and marking those places as memorable points in the story. The final piece “Always Something Somewhere Else” achieves the goal of being a meaningful portable walk where the narrative and sound lead the user in a natural way around the environment.
Where next with mscape
Duncan has several mscape project ideas on the go he is working on a shared game experience where people will need to swap devices, a night time horror piece and something that involves video, where you might have to hold up the device to compare what you have with what is in the landscape.
He hopes that people will appreciate mscape as a platform capable of creating any genre or style of content. He feels that at the moment when you describe mscape people instantly lock on to gallery tours and museum tours and in reality it can be much more. If there were many more mediascapes in many more places and if someone famous created a great mediascape experience then he feels mscape could really tip over the edge.
In the mean time we hope Duncan continues to create great mediascapes and becomes that someone famous!
