Moving tales, exploring narrative strategies for scalable locative audio drama.

This paper reports on a recent collaboration between the Lansdown Centre for Electronic Arts at Middlesex University and the BBC Radio Drama Department, which was designed to investigate the narrative possibilities of locative media in a drama context. The locative drama Scratch is the first outcome of an ongoing research project, Locating Drama, whose aim is to investigate and develop narrative strategies that take full advantage of the current generation of GPS enabled portable computing devices for audio drama. In particular, we are exploring content and modes of interaction, which, while based on location awareness are not in any way site-specific allowing users to experience the drama in a location of their choice. We will refer to this approach as translocational as it allows the translation of locative media experiences to a wide variety of spaces. The translocational approach is of particular interest to broadcasters as it is more scalable than a site-specific paradigm, opening the possibility of downloadable location-aware podcasts featuring professionally authored content for a wide audience

Scratch.

Scratch investigated the use of physical space as a site and representation of narrative and dramatic structure. It was commissioned by and collaboratively developed with BBC Radio Drama. Boyd Davis directed the project and devised and undertook the evaluation with 40 trial listeners. It was unprecedented in being location-sensitive without being tied to any particular place, building on research undertaken for Dragons (Boyd Davis REF Output 4). It used pre-recorded audio on GPS-enabled mobile devices allowing sounds to be virtually attached to locations in an outdoor space. As participants moved, they encountered scenes forming a coherent drama; the same place behaved differently if visited more than once. This translocational approach opened novel artistic possibilities that were exploited through team expertise in narrative, sound design and advanced interaction. It was also significant for the economics of broadcast media, a more viable proposition than the many locative experiences that have been site-specific: a factor of great interest to the BBC. The public performance selected for BBC FreeThinking, September 2008 in Liverpool, that year’s European Capital of Culture, was reported in a co-written 2009 conference presentation at ISEA, Belfast (2009) and in a co-written short chapter in Spierling and Szilas (eds.), Interactive Storytelling (2008). Boyd Davis reported the findings to BBC executives (http://researchonline.rca.ac.uk/1000/), for whom an additional trial was run in London in 2009. He used mixed methods, open but capable of rigorous analysis, to feed back to the makers of the drama and to guide BBC policy. Abigail le Fleming (Producer BBC Radio Drama) confirms that ‘through this collaboration, the Radio Drama department became the first BBC unit to experiment with GPS technologies’. The work ‘brought us to tackle non-linear narratives in ways that we would not have otherwise done… invaluable in terms of the questions that it raised for radio drama.

Technologies of contraception and abortion

Soon to turn 60, the oral contraceptive pill still dominates histories of technology in the ‘sexual revolution’ and after. ‘The pill’ was revolutionary for many, though by no means all, women in the west, but there have always been alternatives, and looking globally yields a different picture. The condom, intrauterine device (IUD), surgical sterilization (male and female) and abortion were all transformed in the twentieth century, some more than once. Today, female sterilization (tubal ligation) and IUDs are the world's most commonly used technologies of contraception. The pill is in third place, followed closely by the condom. Long-acting hormonal injections are most frequently used in parts of Africa, male sterilization by vasectomy is unusually prevalent in Britain, and about one in five pregnancies worldwide ends in induced abortion. Though contraceptive use has generally increased in recent decades, the disparity between rich and poor countries is striking: the former tend to use condoms and pills, the latter sterilization and IUDs. Contraception, a term dating from the late nineteenth century and since then often conflated with abortion, has existed in many forms, and techniques have changed and proliferated over time. Diverse local cultures have embraced new technologies while maintaining older practices. Focusing on Britain and the United States, with excursions to India, China and France, this chapter shows how the patterns observed today were established and stabilized, often despite persistent criticism and reform efforts. By examining past innovation, and the distribution and use of a variety of tools and techniques, it reconsiders some widely held assumptions about what counts as revolutionary and for whom. Analytically, it takes up and reflects on one of the main issues raised by feminists and social historians: the agency of users as patients and consumers faced with choice and coercion. By examining practices of contraception alongside those of abortion, it revisits the knotty question of technology in the sexual revolution and the related themes of medical, legal, religious and political forms of control

Exploded sounds: spatialised partials in two recent multi-channel installations

I discuss two recent sound installations that both explore a spectral sound diffusion technique based on partial tracking that allows individual partials of a sampled sound to occupy individual locations in space. The two installations, The Exploded Sound (60 channels) and Significant Birds (12 channels), use similar techniques and modes of presentation to different ends. The former creates an essentially static listening environment, in which the listeners’ movements in space allow them to explore the inner structure of sound, while the latter focuses on the aural illusion that results from this approach, presenting decomposed speech as electronic “birdsong”, which is reconstructed by the brain into intelligible words. I will discuss technical aspects of the approach alongside the aesthetic aims, describing the research process and some conclusions that have been drawn from experiencing the works in situ. The discussion locates the work within my wider research on navigable sonic structures

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Recording of Nye Parry's Behold my beautiful eyes

Significant Birds

Significant Birds is a 12 channel sound installation created for ILLUSION, an exhibition at the Science Gallery in Dublin, in response to its theme of illusion as a means of accessing the activity of the human brain. The installation extends Parry’s research techniques into ‘exploratory form’, developed for his ‘Exploded Sound’ project, to create a unique aural illusion that interrogates perceptions of sound. In contrast to the static musical soundworld of the former, Significant Birds focuses on rapidly fluctuating sinewaves which occasionally coalesce into recognisable speech. Each of the 12 speakers is hung in a birdcage around the exhibition space. From each speaker a pure 'chirping' sound can be heard which is in fact a single sine wave extracted from a recording of speech. When all twelve speakers are active and in perfect time with one another the listener hears the speech reconstructed, although no speaker ever contains more than its one single 'partial'. Setting up a sound system of rapidly changing harmonics the installation tests how harmonics are gradually pulled apart in time and intelligibility is lost leaving a virtual 'aviary' of chirping sinewaves. Significant Birds uses real-time analysis of a sound file in Max/MSP allowing the use of a constantly changing (speech) input. The text on auditory perception is taken from Helmholtz’s ‘On the Sensations of Tone’

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Recording of Nye Parry's Grand Junction. Grand Junction uses recordings of steam pumping engines from the Kew Bridge Steam Museum in rhythmic interplay, exploring the contrast between recognizable and abstracted sound

MISAME

Recording of Nye Parry's Symbiosis. For electronics and for pre-recorded computer processed sound