Week 4 - Extreme Listening
Week 4 - Extreme Listening
When I think of extreme I think of bass-boosted memes. To get academic on it: it’s the “affect burst” of computers speakers—the scream of a machine that’s been pushed too far. As Sarah put it in lecture: the opera-singer-shattering-the-glass of virtuosic extremeness. Gen-Z loves this sound, undeniably—it’s a core sound of tiktok and current major music releases. To invoke Umru (producer with credits on Charli XCX, Dorian Electra, and Laura Les records): “The world is fucked, our favorite songs are soundcloud rips of leaked Playboi Carti tracks played through iphone speakers. We’re a generation who, in the wise words of producer Iglooghost, have ‘no time for chill vibes.’” (interview with me back in 2019). There’s plenty of conjecture as to why—whether it’s just intriguing, or conjures up the energy of watching a live concert capture on a cell phone, or because it imparts power even on small speaker—but whatever the reason, it’s everywhere: the deep friend meme of audio.
So while first approaching an “extreme listening” creation in virtual reality I knew I wanted to use my favorite bass boost song: the Soviet National Anthem. But I also had two main experiential criteria in mind: The first of which was the sonic experience, in which I wanted to give the user a way to interactively amp up some sort of progressively intensifying sound. The second was the visual experience, which I wanted to link to the auditory sensation to become increasingly over-stimulating as the user pushed things harder—ideally inducing nausea as well, a cornerstone of vr suffering (although this is tough to achieve without allowing for smooth-motion mechanics). The key here is the user-control over the intensity. Something I think about a great deal in terms of “extreme” or, as I usually hear it in my head, “harsh noise” music—is the aggressive nature of imparting it on unwanting listeners. While some ask for harsh noise, many are simply thrust into it—and while that shock can be what makes it so powerful, it can also represent a sort of unwanted attack on a listener. So I thought I’d go the “go as far as you can” route for users, giving them a choice of how far they wanted to take the experience. There’s a fine line between pleasure and pain in the world of extreme noise, and that relationship has always been so interesting to me given the large base of queer and trans creators in scenes at the moment—but that’s a whole other essay (see artists like Dreamcrusher and Black Squares).
So I found some info online about adding 360 video to Unity skyboxes, ripped and edited some footage I found online. Did a tutorial on building spring-loaded levers—and then got stuck for a long time trying to learn how on earth to connect the lever values to the video and audio (distortion, pitch, echo) parameters. Eventually from a great deal of trial and error on the API I got it to run, and my scientist roommates helped me solve my broken lever-angle-to-parameter ratios on their whiteboards. So after a lot of failure it finally did something and I’m very happy with 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.