The new audio installation evokes the culture of the north-west coast of the continent, playing quadrophonic sounds and audio textures captured on the West Coast of British Columbia on a permanent loop inside an acoustically treated chamber.
The engineer responsible for capturing the sounds was Hein Schoer, a German PhD researcher working at the Fontys School of Arts in the Netherlands, and accredited by the University of Maastricht. Schoer recorded the sounds and textures during a three-week trip to Canada's west coast last Autumn, in collaboration with the U'Mista Cultural Centre in Alert Bay, British Columbia.
"The idea is to create an evocation in sound of life in each of these cultural regions, by presenting the sounds of the local weather, animals, and the activities of the indigenous people of the region," he explains. "We had previously put together an audio montage from DAT recordings to represent life in Nunavut for an earlier exhibition, and as a recording engineer, I wanted to see whether I could improve the quality of the recordings from the North-West region."
The Sound Chamber at NONAM is an acoustically treated four-metre square cube designed to contain up to seven people at a time. Inside, light is excluded by black drapes and sound-absorbent foam removes most of the acoustic reflectivity of the chamber, rendering it almost anechoic and allowing the quadraphonic speaker array to immerse the occupant in the sounds of North America's north-west.
Schoer wanted to make true quadrophonic recordings for use in the chamber but without resorting to a cumbersome multi-microphone array, and would have had no way of transporting such a complex rig in rural Canada anyway.
"My original idea was to use a couple of stereo mics to make simultaneous recordings on separate stereo recorders, and sync them in post-production to create quad soundscapes. However, this idea fell through. I contacted SEA and they suggested that I think about taking the SoundField SPS200 instead. It turned out to be the best thing that could have happened. Synchronising two stereo recordings made on separate recorders could have been very hit and miss and time-consuming, but the SPS200 allowed me to capture the audio independently of the output format with one microphone."
The audio captured by the SPS200 can be decoded later in post-production using the SPS200 Surround Zone plug-in, which is supplied free of charge with the microphone. As with SoundField's other multi-capsule microphones, the output from the SPS200 may be converted to a variety of output formats including phase-coherent mono, stereo, quad, or 5.1 surround, without any phase artefacts.
"The sound installation for NONAM is in quadrophonic, but this is also my PhD project, and I intend to make radio presentations in stereo from the recordings," explains Schoer. "So the ability of the SPS200 to output audio in different formats is very useful to me. All I have to do is change some settings in the SoundField decoding software on my laptop."
(Jim Evans)
