Facilitating ambient intelligence of acoustic atmospheres

Barakat, Merate; Meraz, Fidel; Nicoletti, Eleonora

Abstract

“There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot. ” – John Cage, ‘Silence’
The project intends to understand how sounds alter people’s perception of space, and how humans use sonic cues to negotiate their surroundings collectively. The aim works towards finding new understandings, metrics and tools to integrate acoustic sensory aspects into the architectural design, which is lacking.
The FET funded Linking Teaching and Research project is a hands-on design-build installation built by a team of Part 1 and Part 2 students of architecture, with ABE research team. The research explores sound experience in architectural space, underpinned by a phenomenological framework, enabled by material testing, fabrication, and embedded intelligence.
This project is a progression of an initial technical and experiential test-bed partnership between Dr Meraz and Dr Barakat started with the event “Space, Sound, Sensation,” in collaboration with Social Science in the City at UWE Bristol, the Royal Institute of Philosophy, and the Social Science Research Group UWE Bristol. (https://info.uwe.ac.uk/events/event.aspx?id=24240). The installation is a space where sound varies in response to the audience’s movements. As members of the
audience navigate the space, they discover how their collective actions modify the sonic spatial character (pleasant or otherwise). Employing embedded intelligent components, namely sensors and microcontrollers, the movement of the different visitors and their sound effects are recorded, codified and analysed to identify patterns of the initial phenomenological intuitions.

• Exhibition Performance Type: Exhibition
• Start Date: Apr 28, 2022
• End Date: Apr 29, 2022
• Publication Date: Apr 28, 2022
• Deposit Date: Aug 1, 2022
• Publicly Available Date: Aug 1, 2022
• Keywords: Computational Architecture; Digital Fabrication; Phenomenology; Ambient Intelligence
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/9754065