fieldspeakers (2025)
weather citizen (as part of sonotex collective)
Belle Isle, Detroit / Eden Place Farms, Chicago
Video credit: this trailer of If I Think About Sound is provided courtesy of Nathan and Lexi Knox
FIELDSPEAKERS is an outdoor, multichannel, public sound series. Produced by the Neighborhood Art School, it is part of Sound Travels, a multi-year national sound project through the National Science Foundation exploring the relationship between sound and learning in informal learning spaces.
With a cohort of nine composers, we gathered ambisonic, stereo, and contact mic recordings at Wahnabezee (Belle Isle) in Detroit and created multichannel fixed-media productions with the material. We then hosted two free public events — one on Belle Isle in Detroit and one at Eden Place Farms in Chicago — where we presented our work.
This interactive ambisonic audio player presents a render of visiting shards as it was presented on Belle Isle and Eden Place Farms.
To use, simply click LISTEN and drag cursor around the screen to dynamically move listening orientation. The audio will render in real time based on these movements.
For best results, listen on headphones via Brave, Firefox, or Chrome browsers (Safari does not support ambisonic audio).
Binaural rendering by Omnitone (Google, Apache-2.0), using HRIRs from the SADIE database (University of York). Player and interface by weather citizen.
weather citizen’s piece is a trans-seasonal injunction on the natural-within-urban settings in which it was presented. Particularly in the case of the Belle Isle event, it re-presented sounds — wind in bare branches, crunches of ice, creaks of trees, voices — from the same location recorded the previous winter. Samples — or shards — of these sounds were then reintegrated into the spring environment, creating a fractured sonic haunting of one season in another.
In these installations, the Neighborhood Art School’s eponymous sound system was arranged in 7.1.4 format — 7 nearfield monitors were positioned around the perimeter of the spaces along with 1 subwoofer, and 4 nearfield monitors were flown using straps between trees and architecture.
