Project 1 – Some thoughts

For the past two days, I have been discussing with Juice how to separate the two worlds so that their sounds independently do not interfere with each other, and the audience can hear the outside when they are standing inside and the inside when they are standing outside.

Two options, one is physical isolation, another one is a new sound system.

The first option is to use a very light and transparent fabric to enclose the 8-channels system and then suspend these with the fishing line. But at the end of the piece, the sound environments of the two worlds merge and become consistent, so these cloths are not needed here. So I need a device to connect these fish lines and let these fish lines control these cloths. So that the cloths would be retracted at the 20-minute mark and put back down after five minutes. And I want to remove all the cloth, so a system like the one used to control the photography backdrops in the studio might be more suitable.

But I wonder if this contraction will be too loud. And the audience standing in the middle can’t see what’s on the screen through the cloth, although this problem can be solved with VR glasses. The first-person perspective is perfect for using VR glasses.

The second option is to use a 7.1 or 5.1 sound system to play diegetic sound and then use 3D audio headphones to play non-diegetic sound and monologue.

With the popularity of VR Games and the introduction of the PS5, 3D audio is again gaining attention. 3D audio systems can virtually place sound in any orientation around the listener by tricking the listener’s ears. 3D audio allows the listener to pinpoint the location of the sound and is, therefore, more widely used in games, especially first-person games. 3D audio technology makes games more immersive. The development of 3D audio is relatively complex, and to find out exactly how sound changes as it reaches our ears, technicians conducted a series of measurement experiments and presented the Head Related Transfer Function (HRTF).

Although 3D audio technology is often used in gaming, its characteristics are perfect for this project, with its first-person perspective and immersive feel. And using the headset will make the monologue fit closer to the ear, with that feeling of talking in your ear. It is even possible to let the monologue ring in the head, as in the Exploding head syndrome (EHS) mentioned previously in Project 1 – Memoria.

One problem that needs to be solved if I use the headset is learning the 3D audio technology. The other is how much of the sound from the outside audio equipment can reach the human ear when wearing the headphones, which requires testing the volume ratio between the various sound elements.