The Listening Room, Biennale of Sydney

This installation was created in the Queen's Powder Magazine on Goat Island, a nature reserve in Sydney Bay. The building is an enormous former munitions warehouse with very thick sandstone walls and an arched roof, built around 100 years ago.

Two sets of scaffolding at each end of the space held speakers bouncing the sound off the arch, source was a single PZM microphone situated around head height half way along one side wall. A nearby boatyard on the island contributed metallic crashes and grinding noises which inspired the system to respond, not always predictably.

This particular Listening Room presented two specific problems:

Scale - a combination of scale and volume of the building and the available permutations of positioning the system was slightly too large to enable the presence of human bodies in the space to modulate the feedback notes - this did not prevent visitors becoming part of the experience by making noise - footsteps, speaking or singing.

Damp - heavy overnight rain tended to soak into the sandstone fabric of the building causing extremely high humidity first thing in the mornings. This made the system over-sensitive causing a very high level of feedback for the first hour or so until the building warmed up in the daytime sunshine and the system stabilised. (usually by the time it was open to the public).

Activated Space is David Cunningham's project to develop and present a series of installations that alter an architectural space in real time to allow its resonant frequencies to become audible and interactive. The project combines elements from sculpture, electronic media, music, architecture and acoustics.

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