Week 2 - Earthtalk
Week 2 - Earthtalk
After sitting for 20 minutes by the beach near Scripps Pier—I felt I had basically failed at meditation in the conventional sense—my mind did not clear. I instead was forcing myself to focus on every little sound and detail in pursuit of an idea as to how to represent it in an interesting way. I scribbled down some random notes in my notepad (which most people probably cannot decipher) as a way to focus my thoughts, and brought along my binaural earbud mics to capture some basic sounds of the space. Once home, I threw all of this into Ableton to play around with some possible ideas—but felt they were all just sort of a) boring to me and b) not deserving of the original environment and thoughts I’d had. So I decided to do the week’s reading and take a break—which then inspired me to go garden on my patio. I de-weeded and watered, caring for the plants that had begun to bud—taking some binaural recordings along the way. My roommate then began to practice the violin—and so I grabbed some audio of that as well. An idea I’d had was to recreate the meditation based on what I expected to hear versus what I actually heard there. In that there would be recordings of water splashing, seagulls, plants rustling—when in reality there was basically white noise and airplanes. So I also got some audio of water running in sinks in my house, and found a section of my audio from the beach in which I purposefully moved my hands through some long plants with the mics close up.
So after all this I’m still lost, but am now spending more time considering what the mediation really was in that the majority of the introspection and analysis occurred around the 20 minute section of the day rather than within the 20 minutes itself. I sleep on it. And the next day I decide to try and bring to life an idea I put in my messy notes the day before: what if I could grab all the objects on that beach and pull them next to my ears to hear them up close? I’d been spending lots of quarantine time in VR to escape, but I’d never build anything for it—so I figured today’s the day, why not. And so a few unity tutorials and lots of googling later—I end up with this Unity application. In it, each binaural file from the day is assigned to a cube, and that cube can be interacted with in full physical space, with spatialize audio feeding out of it.
To me, this represents a new way to considering my own memory—in that it can be adjusted, stacked, moved, and tossed in ways a memory can be inside ones own head—in a sense. It’s a way to consider how I store and interpret spatial memories, and how I’m able to rearrange them in my own mind. I feel a high rigid and unnatural take on the natural memory-scape actually provides a more engaging way to explain a meditation—rather than trying to give a realistic representation matching my ears, which the original binaural file would, it attempts to explain the level of thought play at work during the 20 minutes, and the extended period of the day in which I decontextualized, analyzed, and sorted those memories in my own head. By providing the pieces of the memory as opposed to the curated whole—one can construct their own concept of the space within VR. And they can do so via associated sounds rather than simply “real” ones—in the sense that a running faucet better conveys what I associated with water than a white noise beach wave does—it’s what I wanted to hear and what the water may have sounded like if I had been out in it splashing around. I loved this exercise, and I’d like to try it again in a concerted way in the future with a greater range of freedom for the VR participant to explore.
P.S. On the topic of human-adjacent auditory experiences—I performed last week as a virtual avatar for the first time and it was extremely strange and totally fascinating—short clip here and full set audio file here. It was extremely weird seeing myself as this virtual tracked body and even hearing my own modified vocals come out of it on my speakers. Very disembodying but also cool.