Sounding Public Space, Sound Artists in the Public Domain
Dr Ros Bandt
The Australian Centre
Uninversity of Melbourne
137 Barry Street, Carlton
Victoria 3053, Australia
r.bandt@unimelb.edu.au
ABSTRACTThe right to quiet has been defined as a public commons(Franklin, 1993). Public space in Australia is becoming
increasingly sound designed. This presentation investigates
the variety of approaches by sound artists who have installed
public space drawing on the three year ARC AustralianSound
DesignProject's
research,
website,http://www.sounddesign.unimelb.edu.au and public outreach
Hearing Place. Current trends and practices will be comparedand contrasted and conclusions drawn about the implications
for Australia's soundscape in the future.
1.

many important decisions have to be made which arecommon to all sounding artworks.
These decisions relate to:
1.
2.

3.

INTRODUCTION
4.

Every place is an acoustic space. To be fully cognizant weneed to be aware of the acoustic features of every place we
inhabit, of the planned or unplanned sounds wherever we are,whether outdoor or indoor, public or private. The sum totalof the relationship of sound, noise and quiet, whether
designed or not forms the soundscape or acoustic
environment. While research and discourse surrounding
noise and the soundscape has been well under way for thirty
years, (Schafer, Truax, Attali, Franklin) the place thatdesigned sound has in the soundscape is only beginning toreceive scholarly attention. The purpose of this paper is toarticulate some of the ways in which Australian soundpractitioners are already designing sound in the publicdomain so that current trends and practices can be examined,
compared and contrasted. This knowledge is essential to the
future of Australia’s soundscape, as the interfaces between
design and acoustic space are already underway and are fully
able to be experienced. Sound artists and acoustic designers
are forming a contemporary layer to Australia’s acoustic
palimpsest which reaches back to the ancient sung land
practices of indigenous peoples. (Belfrage, Bandt). They are
already redefining public acoustic space and in so doing,laying the foundation for new principles, practices and sonicexperiences of the future.
2.

AUSTRALIAN SOUNDING ARTWORKS IN
PUBLIC SPACE: THE WORKS

Sounding artworks and sound designs come in many forms,
from permanent to temporary or ephemeral, and indoor
outdoor or virtual. The overriding determining factors are thechoice of the site and the nature of the engagement between
the artist and the hosting body whether rooted in physical or
virtual space. Within the parameters of the artwork brief,

5.

6.

The type and composition of the sound it contains(pitch/time, sonority/scale relationships).
How the sound itself is installed into the acoustic
space and context, its spatial dispersion, thedurational programming of events.
The degree of change from one day to another.
This area has become much more complex over the
recent years with complex system development
softwares becoming readily available.
The visual requirements of the environment, which
can be as varied as complex sounding objects,
kinetic machines, sculptural and multimedia
installations, or they may be invisible complex
spatial music installations where the array of
speakers through the space is the only perceivable
physical component. These may or may not be
visible to the viewer.
The role of the auditor/s, fixed or moving, free todetermine direction, spatial position and timelengths within the works.
The degree of interactivity presented to the auditor,
giving power to change the content or form of thesounding artwork itself. This raises the question
who is the sound for and who is allowed to change
and interact with it.

Individual works have provided answered to thequestions proposed as the design process is tailored to thespecific site and events planned.
2.1. Contexts and Examples: sites and solutions
All the examples in this paper are situated in the pubic
domain, being defined as a place to which the public haveaccess. Every space is political. The overriding determinantof sound art is the nature of the relationship between the site
and the artist, and their knowledge and understanding of thespace and intention. The choice of site defines major
considerations, indoor outdoor, permanent temporary, theacoustic surfaces presented and the existing soundscape. The
nature of the sound design invitation, whether event,exhibition, tender or commission, frames durational
possibilities including the hours of opening as well as
influencing the type of public which may be attracted. To
some extent every sound work is site specific to theenvironment where it is located. But some artists have built
these interfaces into their work more than others.
In 2001, sound artist Roger Alsop in collaboration with ateam of performance artists and musicians interrogated theidea of site as cultural paradigm by building two Rice
Paddies, one in central urban Melbourne, outside theMelbourne Town Hall, the other in Footscray, a western
suburb with a large Asian community. Other artists included
musicians Madeline Flynn, Tim Humphrey and performance
artists Simon Woodward, Yumi Umiumare, Tony Yap andJackie Smith. The idea came about from a phone call frominstigators Jason Cross & Victoria Raywood, writer directors
who asked Roger Alsop if he would be interested in putting arice paddy in an urban place. “This was extremely interesting
as there were so many juxtapositions and contradictions in
the idea,”(Alsop). The different demographics were built into
the project as were the sounds of the physical environment,
trams, buskers, audience members, and the effect of thebuildings on the sounds used. Introduced sounds included
recordings from parliament, shortly after the Tampa crisis,
including Bob Brown’s famous speech and the SBS WorldNews played randomly, so that at no time was one language
given prominence. These were played through a large
megaphone to give the feeling of the indoctrinating voice.
Incessant bird sounds were punctuated with musicians
improvising with a rain tank, an Australian symbol whichmorphed into a Taiko drum at times. The decibel levels of
this new layer of site exploration needed carefulconsideration. Alsop states: “the intention was to impose theshow on the place, despite the fact that both venues arecommercial trading centres….At the same time it wasconsidered that the performance should become a part of theplace. Therefore amplitude levels were kept to about thesame, or a bit louder than, the loudest environmental sounds.
In the City Square this was the sound of trams measured atabout three meters, about the same distance as a pedestrianon the kerb from a passing tram. In the Footscray Mall thiswas the sound of a passing truck at about 5 metres. Whensetting the levels for the amplification system a distance ofabout 1.5 metres from the speakers was used. This amplitudelevel was adjusted to suit the changes in ambient noise level
and if it was significantly impacting on the vendors in thearea.” See video link, Rice Paddies Courtesy of Roger Alsop:
www.sounddesign.unimelb.edu.au/web/alsop/rpHi.mov

Figure 1. Roger Alsop and collaborators, “Rice
Paddies”, 2001, Photo courtesy of the artists
2.2. Indoor temporary works
A large proportion of sounding art works are indoor works
occurring in galleries for three to six weeks. Les Gilbert and
Gillian Chaplin’s Love is a wonderful thing wascommissioned for the Hearing Place Exhibition, 2003 at the
Yarra Sculpture Gallery, City of Yarra. A mixed media
collaborative work, it ‘consisted of a matrix of sounding boxlike assemblages, projection screens, video and photographs.
Individual channels of sound were triggered on the listener's
approach to each box through the listening eye’(Chaplin/Gilbert artistic statement.) Each box also contained
a concealed loudspeaker and a motion sensor, making public,
a collection of private thoughts and memories. The soundcommon to all the boxes was the female voice of Gillian
singing the song Love is a wonderful thing with subtle
variations. The pathways of the viewer /listeners caused
these voices to intersect in a gentle spatial polyphony,modulated with other sounds from intriguing worldwide
location video recordings projected on screens and the back
of
the
boxes
(www.sounddesign.unimelb.edu.au/web/gilbert/loveis.mp3).
The audio and visual relationships were co-ordinated throughcomputer-controlled data, allowing compositional features tobe unwittingly composed by the pathways of the viewerlistener through the exhibition space. “The piece explored therelationships between a very private and intimate glimpse ofinterior vulnerability and the vastness of the urban landscape,both physical and environmental.” Chaplin/Gilbert.
http://www.sounddesign.unimelb.edu.au/web/biogs/P000411
b.htm

Figure 2. Gillian Chaplin and Les Gilbert “Love is a
Wonderful Thing”, 2003. Yarra Sculpture Gallery for
the Hearing Place Exhibition of Sound Art. Photo:
Courtesy of the Artists
This was one of two of the Hearing Place exhibitions
and audiotheque of sound art and mixed media curated by theAustralian Sound Design Project to coincide with theinternational conference of the World Forum of Acoustic
Ecology. The diversity of works exhibited can be seen andheard at www.sounddesign.unimelb.edu.au/site/news.htm.
The audiotheque at the VCA gallery brought together
some 59 artists from 13 countries with sound works spanningclassic electro-acoustic and soundscape composition to pure
unedited field recordings. Many of the works utilised'binaural' recording techniques which when listened to withheadphones, immerse the listener in a 3-dimensional soundspace. Much thought was given to the spatial and temporaldesign of the audiotheque so that it would be a pleasantlistening experience but be content rich. Over seven hours ofaudio were presented at a group listening station with seating
positioned under 8 sets of suspended headphones. This
offered a chance for 8 people to share a common listening
sequence at the same time.

Nagai (USA). The Hearing Place CD is available throughMove Records at: www.move.com.au/disc.cfm/3275.
3.

DURATIONAL ASPECTS OF SOUND DESIGNCONSIDERED

Curating group shows of sound installations is challenging.
Sound spills and acoustic spaces need to be shared. Isolating
sound walls, grouping compatible works, designing the groupspaces with the artists from the outset, using headphones,
timers, interactive devices and creative scheduling are waysof avoiding common pitfalls. The gallery exhibition of soundart can be limiting due to the overriding politic of the gallery
opening hours and the length of the show in days or weeks.
When exhibitions are permanent, such as in museum
situations, other questions come into play such as how long isthe durational design, and how much variety is there? Can
the exhibition change or morph, is there interactivity? Or can
the exhibition be responsive to the number and type of
people present? Permanent exhibitions in the outdoors offerdifferent environmental concerns such as changing light andtemperature, exposure to physical contact, changing weather
conditions and unpredictable people flow. The durational
aspect of sound art may be intended to be short, as in the caseof the radio broadcast, but it is interesting to see that mostradio stations are documenting their programs on the Internet
for greater temporal and geographic dissemination. The
Internet is a place where long and short term works can coexist, but the quality of the sound heard and its dispersion
have rarely been fully optimised. While the spatial featuresof sound art are often discussed, as they are so easily
perceivable, the temporal design is often much less obvious,
as it demands substantial listening time and effort for it to beunderstood. Few people are trained to understand the depthof the more prolonged artworks or willing to dedicate enoughtime to understand the full potential of the works.
3.1. Permanent works

Figure 3. The Australian Sound Design Project,
Hearing Place, International Audiotheque, March
2003, Photo: Iain Mott
There was also an individual station that allowed the listenerto select each track on demand. The Audiotheque wasaccompanied by projected texts on each work andbiographies of each artist. This curatorial decision allowed
both group and individual use of the 7 hour long sequence,with many people returning several times, while others did
quick searches to access their preferred listening choice. Like
many forms of sound art, the sound itself was the main focus,
with an audio CD Hearing Place being published by Move
Records of the best 10 international works responding toplace- a lasting record of the event. Composers include
Samuel Pellman (USA), Christopher DeLaurenti (USA), Jon
Drummond (Australia), Aaron Ximm (USA), Greg Hooper(Australia), Viv Corringham (United Kingdom), Pierre
Thoma (Switzerland), Gabriele Proy (Austria), and Michelle

Permanent works may offer the listener an extended
opportunity to listen to the complexity of a work, but thisdepends of the form and function of the sound design. The
opportunity may not be taken up if the viewer only
experiences the work once for a short time, for example inthe museum situation where works remain, but the visitor
may move through quite fleetingly. In some cases, it may not
be obvious that it is an introduced artwork. The experience of
the auditory phenomenon may be a surprising feature, suchas in Peter Mumme’s design for the Cairns airport, a gentle
soundscape experienced by a captive group of people
assembled for another purpose, travelling to and from Cairns.
His soundscape is spatially and temporally designed to track
the movement of people arriving and alighting at the airport
as they move through customs and collect their baggage. The
speaker array on the following diagram shows therelationship of sounding points in relation to the user
pathway. The entire compositional material is computer
controlled to be synchronised with the airport flight schedule.

Figure 4. Peter Mumme, “Cairns International Airport
Sound Experience”, floor plan, 1996, courtesy of theartist“Each unit contains a miniature digital audio chip,coupled to a digital timer, set individually so that each of thethirty units has a unique time signature. The audio chips
contain short samples of natural history sounds, bird song,
and insect song and frog voices. The combination of multiple
sound sources, in conjunction with individual time signatures
and the fluctuations of the solar power supply give thesoundscape an un-cannily natural presence. Technically, thisis a type of emergent behaviour in which, although we mightrecognise the repetition of individual sounds, the overallsoundscape is in fact an infinite mix; somewhat akin to thealways familiar, but never repeating sounds of a creek. In
reality, the soundscape blends so seamlessly with the naturalenvironment it is quite difficult to distinguish the artificialfrom the natural soundscape. The physical structure of the
sculpture employs the metaphor of plant biology and thethirty units are grouped as if to form a bed of lotus plants.”
See Helyer:
www.sounddesign.unimelb.edu.au/web/biogs/P000295b.htm

The speakers are flush to the wall and painted as part ofthe overall mural so they are integrated into the environment
just as the sounds used in the soundscape are derived fromthe local environment- bird, water, and forest sounds whichsignify the identity of the place and things yet to come. For
an audio example see:www.sounddesign.unimelb.edu.au/web/mumme/cairns2.mp3.

Figure 6. Nigel Helyer, “MetaDiva”, Werribee Park, 2002
Permanent outdoor sculpture and winner of the Helen
Lempriere prize. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Figure 5. Peter Mumme, “Cairns International
Airport Sound Experience”, speaker picture,
courtesy of the artist

3.2. Permanent outdoor sound art
Permanent outdoor sound art is one of the most difficult toexecute. Nigel Helyer has a long track record in this field.
His award winning work Meta Diva is an environmentallysensitive sound sculpture, designed for installation at the
Werribee Park wetlands site. It comprises thirty individual
units, each with a solar powered digital audio ‘voice’ whichemulates an element of the natural soundscape.

The introduction of the cheap imported chirp sound of
the chips is comic when heard in the setting of the rich
Australian natural environment yet the rhythmic fluctuations
caused by the tiny solar panels make the work engaging. The
physical elements of the design are elegant and the durable
casing of the sound components requiring no power or
maintenance is clever and practical.
4.

TECHNOLOGY, SYSTEMS DEVELOPMENT,INTERACTIVITY

Most sound installations and sounding artworks are reliant on
a barrage of technical apparatus and the history of the genre
maintains this close relationship between art and technology
since Grainger’s free music experiments, which started
before the nineteen fifties. Australian sound art has embraced
the design of complex sound systems, spatial music systems
and interactive immersive environments and has been amajor player in the field since the CSIRAC, the Fairlight, 3
DIS, Schiemer’s Audio tool box and Bencina’s Audio Mulchamong others. The 3 DIS, (Three Dimensional Interactive
Space), developed by Simon Veitch of Perceptive Systems in
the nineteen eighties, enabled an entire space to become asounding and playable environment through the use of video
surveillance cameras triggering MIDI information to 99 subareas of a given space. The dancers Shona Innes, Jane
Refshauge and Sylvia Staehli created several innovative
performances and installations with composers Warren Burt
and Ros Bandt. Five works were designed and presented at St
Martin’s Theatre in Hear the dance and see the music, March
1989. This set a precedent for many other art and technology
residencies at major laboratories like the CSIRO and industry
partners such as LAKE.
Some artists have been able to develop their own
systems, custom- made for their artistic visions. Burt’s
Aardvark and Rainer Linz’s systems for Stelarc and Jon
Rose’s interactive sound are notable examples. The works ofGarth Paine, Map 1&2 and Gestation, are extraordinary featsof contrapuntal spatial sound offering the audience theopportunity to sonically play the space they inhabit and makeit their own, through whole body conducting. Gestation,
shown at RMIT gallery in 2002 used David Rokeby’s VNS(Very Nervous System) video synthesis as a controller of theelaborate sound fields, which provided data from which
emergent digital embryos were generated in the next room.
These visual outcomes were designed to be the by product of
the immersive interactive sound activity in the first room, thesound taking precedence over the eye, in reverse tocommonly held digital art procedures which preference thescreen over the ear. The absence of visual forms intensifies
the experience. Contrastingly, Iain Mott’s has collaborated
with sculptor Mark Raszewski over many years to create
interactive sound sculptures which offer the auditor inventive
interfaces to drive the sound such as The Talking Chair, theSqueezebox, and the Sound Mapping mobile suitcases. A
recent work Close incorporates video and binaural sound,while a future international project Chinese Whispers will
use peer-to-peer networking to enable the sharing of spoken
narratives between remote locations. “The installations will
each have a device such as a telephone for entering stories,
loudspeakers and a computer connected to the Internet.
Computers will be unobtrusive, if visible at all, and nomonitor will be used. Text panels will describe the projectand state the question. The loudspeakers in each installation
space will play a constantly changing array of stories fromaround the country. On picking up the phone, the stories willstop and the participants will hear the question spoken in
their local dialect over the phone and be prompted to speak.
They will then tell their story. Once they hang up, they willhear fragments of their own story over the loudspeakers andnew interwoven narratives from around the country
accompanied by pre-recorded environmental sounds
corresponding to the origin of each voice. Eventually thesestories will run their course and new narratives from different
locations will be introduced until another participant
refreshes the cycle with a new story.” Sounding artworks
designed over multiple locations reflects an interest in public
space in its global form. A demonstration of the audio isavailable at: www.reverberant.com/cw/cwmp3.htm

Figure 6. Iain Mott, “Chinese Whispers”, 2004-5,
Future work in progress for China. Schematic
diagram showing communication between
installations. Courtesy of the artist
A vast array of recording files can be automaticallygenerated from a range of assigned highlight points so thatthe emergent counterpoint will change constantly according
to Motts’s spatial and durational presets. There are many
possible outcomes, this fragment being a possible strand of aconstantly changing working process and sonic outcome.
Paine and Mott’s works are elegantly designed from all
points of view due to their multi-skilled backgrounds ascomposers, installation and visual artists, and theirexperience collaborating with other artists and withaudiences. Both have developed original ways of integrating
IT and coding skills for the service of their artistic visions.
Paine’s work Reeds is an environmentally sensitive work
which uses realtime weather data to shape and sculpt the
spatial and sonic outcomes. These were heard fromsophisticated sculptural reed pods containing speakers
floating on the lake in the Melbourne Botanical Gardens
where the work was first commissioned for the Melbourne
International festival.
www.sounddesign.unimelb.edu.au/web/biogs/P000258b.htm.
One is reminded of Les Gilbert’s early installation atSouthbank Boulevard, bordering the Yarra river, Melbourne
which also used a weather station to computer control
elements of the sound events along the Boardwalk in its
initial design.

Figure 7. Les Gilbert, SouthBank Installation,
Melbourne, 1991, Photo Ros Bandt

5.

Figure 8. Hassel and McLachlan, “Federation
Bells”, Birremung MarrCOMPLEX HYBRID FORMS

A completely original sounding artwork which is at once asound sculpture and an interactive musical instrument isFederation Bells, at Birremung Marr, designed by the
sculptor Anton Hassel and composer physicist, Neil
McLachlan. It is a remarkable work from several points ofview. The first and most obvious is that is of politicalsignificance, it being a gift of the state to the people tocelebrate the centenary of Federation. The second is that the
acoustic properties of the bell have been reassessed to create
a new cross-cultural bell, including both Asian and European
influences in its design. The third is that it is a programmableand playable musical instrument capable of automaticallyplaying computer generated compositions such as those by
the seven composers commissioned for the opening,
Broadstock, McLachlan, Boyd, McDermott, Koukias,
Norman, Paine. It has a playable keyboard interface, whichmeans one could theoretically perform and improvise with or
through the bells in real time. Fourthly it has a capacity toreceive on- line compositions in the future as composers cancompose sound structures for it from anywhere in the world.
To date, these last two characteristics have yet to be realised.
The relationship of the sound to the site needs
examination in all sounding artworks. At Birremung Marr
original bell tones created by two artists and designed to beplayed at 8 and 5 o’clock daily are introduced sounds. Many
hours of silence occur when the piece becomes a beautiful
static sculpture one can walk through. For several months it
has not been sounding at all due to a maintenance problem,
existing as a sculpture which is a poetic metaphore, for soundthat might be.

6.

PUBLIC SPACE – COMMUNITY VOICESA different approach is where the sounds of the community
using the public space are integrated with the sound sources
and merely woven together by the artist such as in the case of
The Listening Place, Alma Park, commissioned by the Cityof Port Phillip for the Margins, Memories and Markers
project. In this work, stories collected in many different
languages from users of the park are part of an hour long
composition mixed with the ambient sound of the park as
well as sounds referenced in the stories, such as dogs
barking, trains, the beach etc. The commissioning body, theCouncil defined the demographic representation of thecommunity content in this work rather than the artist andseveral community workshops were held prior to the artist’s
engagement. Words for listen in several languages were
etched in bluestone, the idea of the sound artist typeset by thevisual artist and co-ordinator Julie Sheills and with the seatrealised by the Council. The instigation of the sounding
artwork by the hosting body and the community itself
ensures its relevance and longevity. It was very much a
community team who executed the work and they took
ownership for it under the guidance of Ilka Tampke and thelandscape architect Adam Nitschke.

Figure 8. Bandt, Ros, The Listening Place, 2003,
Alma Park. Photos Ros Bandt

7.

CONCLUSION

Artists have designed sound in public space in many different
ways, from indoor, outdoor, temporary, permanent small andlarge scale, as the table in the appendix shows. Some works
have many forms such as Federation Bells and Chinese
Whispers. Indeterminate and varied sonic outcomes are seen
to be desirable and programmed in to many works. In somecases the visitor may be given the opportunity to play,intercept, change or make sound contributions for thedesigns. Some communities have defined their own sounding
artworks. Australian sound art in public space bears the fruitof much artistic vision, clever systems design, and complex
political agreements. On the Australian Sound Design Project
website there are over 130 works with 70 different function
descriptors. Visit the physical locations if you can for
exciting auditory and participatory spatial listening and if
this is not possible experience them audio-visually in the online gallery of The Australian Sound Design Website atwww.sounddesign.unimelb.edu.au. The soundscape ischanging as more and more works are introduced just as theambient sound is changing according to changing lifestylepatterns. The introduction of all sound into the environment
needs to be sensitively monitored by the artists and publicalike. The right to quiet may need more attention. The tableshows that all works in this paper have taken this into
account which is a good sign. The soundscape of the future is
being shaped wittingly and unwittingly by the attitudes andsonic additions of the present. As Murray Schafer advises,
keep the ears open (Shafer, 2003).
8.

BIBLIOGRAPHY[1] Schafer, R. Murray, Our sonic environment and thesoundscape: The tuning of the world. Rochester. VT
Destiny Books, 1994
[2] Truax, Barry, Acoustic Communication, ABLEX
Publishing Westport, Connecticut, London 2001
[3] Attali, J, Noise. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1985, p 7.

[4] Franklin, Ursula, “Silence and the notion of theCommons”, Soundscape ,The Journal of Acoustic
Ecology,Vol. 1, no 2, pp.14-17, 2000.
[5] Belfrage, Jane, “The Great Australian Silence,:Inside
Acoustic
Space.”
http://www.sounddesign.unimelb.edu.au/site/papers/Aus
Silence.html[6] Bandt, Ros, “Hearing Australian Identity: Site as
Acoustic Space, an Pudible polyphony” Conference
Proceedings Nation and narration, The University of
Queensland
June
2001,
www.sounddesign.unimelb.edu.au/site/NationPaper/Nat
ionPaper.html[7] Alsop, “Rice Paddies”, personal correspondence, June
2004.
[8] Bandt, Ros, “Documenting the Difficult and Ephemeral,a Web Approach to the Documentation of Interactive
Electro-acoustic Sound Designs in Australia”,
www.ircam.fr/resonances2003/Ross_Bandt.html[9] Bandt, Ros ‘The 3 DIS,” in Creative Approaches toInteractive Technology in Sound Art, Deakin University,
1990, pp.14-22.
[10] Bandt, Ros, Sound and Sculpture, Intersections inAustralian Artworks, Craftsman House, Thames andHudson, 2001.
[11] Mott, Iain, “Chinese Whispers” artistic statement,
personal
correspondence,
2004,
www.reverberant.com/cw[12] Schafer, R. Murray, “Open ears”, in The Auditory
Culture Reader, Michael Bull and Les Back editors,
Berg, Oxford, U.K. 2003, pp.25-39.
[13] The Australian Sound Design Project is at
http://www.sounddesign.unimelb.edu.au. Over one
hundred and thirty works have been published on thewebsite alphabetically accessible through a Browse
page. Works can be called up by artists, site, title,
events, organizations and function. The inclusion of amultimedia gallery for each work allows not only for
text, image, diagrams and audio, but also the temporalaudiovisual video to be experienced. Aspects of soundart, artists and works can be searched, and refereed
theoretical and multimedia papers read (Carter,
Belfrage, Burt, Bandt, Paine). Other extensive researchtools include a searchable bibliography, (340 entries)
and links to software, funding and organizations. If you
have original sound works you would like to include on
the
site,
visit
the
contributepage
http://www.sounddesign.unimelb.edu.au/site/contribute.
html, or contact
Dr Ros Bandt or Iain Mott at the Australian Centre, theUniversity of Melbourne.

9.

APPENDIX I. COMPARATIVE SUMMARY OF SOUND DESIGN FEATURES IN WORKS DISCUSSED

9.1. Part 1
Sound Designed
Features1.Commissioned
2.Community consult.
3.Site indoor/ outdoor
4.Type of Collaboration

Cairns Airport

Meta DivaI
Composer, computerengineerI

OSoundscape, electronic
environmental,
electronic

Found polychips
on timers

T

Variedelectronic
soundscape,Algorhythmic,
SampledTPP

3 weeks
CD Radio,
live
Yes
Yes

3 weeks
Computerprogrammed
YesNo

2 weeks
Computerprogrammed
YesNo

24 hour
Computer programmed

daytimeSolar chips

FlightPlane sensitive

Light
Yes

Cd Radio

Assemblages
Video

MuralsSculptureassemblages

No, murals

Florettes in lake

14. ScreensTank,
platform
No

Yes

Touch
Screens,
Headphones
HeadphoneloungeYes

No

No

15. Speaker Arrays

Stereo16 insculptures

8headphones
suspended

Tiny In florettes

16. Internet
17. Silence
18. Listener Pathways
freeNoStreet

Yes
Free

Yes
Restricted

Wall painted speakers
throughout
Yes
Yes
GuidedGestation

ChineseWhispers

Southbank
Promenade

5. Macro form
installation, I,
performance P
6. Micro, sound sources,
soundscape,environmental,
algorithmic, sampled,original, improvised, live
performance, electronic
7.Temporary or
Permanent
8. Duration
9. Systems
10. Interactivity
11. Environmentallysensitive
12. Mixed Media

13. Visual sculptures

Rice Paddies

Love is a…

Audiotheque

X

ASDP

ASDP

O
Cross artform

I
Duet

I

I, P

I

I

Env, s, o,elect, live
perf,
improvised

S,o, env,

T

I

Yes
In lake9.2. Part 2
Sound Designed
Features1.Commissioned
2.Community consult.
3.Site indoor/ outdoor
4.Type of Collaboration

5. Macro form
installation, performance

Federation Bells
State govt

I

Audience
interactive
installation

Yes
O
Generalpublic /Visual artists
Audience
interactive
installationO

Installation

YesO

Inst, musical instrument
7 original compositions

The Listening
Place
City of Port
PhilipYes
O
City of Port
Philip,Installation

6. Micro, sound sources,
environmental,
algorithmic, sampled,original, live
performance, electronic
7.Temporary or
Permanent
8. Duration
9. Systems

Algorithmic,
samples,
electronic,
environmental

Audience
interviews,
algorithmic,
environmental

Sampled,electronic
environmentalComputer programmed
acoustic bells

Community
voices,environmental
electronic

T

T

P

P

P

3 weeks
RMIT
VNS, video
programming,
algorithms

Variable

24 hour

Daylight hours

Internetcomputer
controlled
realtime
streaming
Yes
Yes

Computerprogrammed
random files

2 performances
per day 8 &5
Timed performances,computer controlled

Weather
Yes

Potential
No

No
No

No
No

No
Yes

No
Yes

No
Boardwalk

No
No
Yes
Yes
Free

no
Stereo in groundno
Yes
Seated

10. Interactivity
11. Environmentallysensitive
12. Mixed Media
13. Visual sculptures

Yes
No
Yes
No

14. Screens
15. Speaker Arrays
16. Internet
17. Silence
18. Listener Pathways

Yes
Quad
Yes
Free

Yes
Telephones /Objects andtexts createdby visualartists
No
Multi –site
Yes
Yes
Fixed

Yes
Free

60 minute loop