Sound Room is a small intimate space built like a Japanese tea room for the tea ceremony. The audience enters the Sound Room through a small low entrance and are surrounded by sound proof walls providing a very intimate acoustic space. In the middle of the room, there is a ceremony table designed as a small rock garden with 13 plastic tubes coming up from the floor. Within these 13 tubes, 11 tubes are connected to different spaces outside the Sound Room through long plastic tubes to "steal" sound from other environments. One tube is connected to the Sound Room itself. The longest tube is more than 35 meters and the shortest is connected to the 13th tube in the ceremony table. In the Sound Room, a "Sound Ceremony" is held by the Sound Master. During the ceremony, the audience listens to the delicate sounds from different spaces outside the Sound Room by connecting a special set of headphones to the tube connectors in ceremony table. The special headphones are hollow with tubes attached to each each side. Using accessory tubes, T-connectors, L-connectors and I-connectors, the audience can create multiple variations of sound mixes such as: having two or more people listen to the same source, "air mixing" two or more sources, etc. The audience help each other by moving their body position to support the tube structure as it grows and becomes more and more complex. The Sound Master talks through the 13th tube so that if the audience member connects their headphones to the special tube in the sound ceremony table they can hear her. The Ceremony climaxes as the complexity of the tubes reaches its maximum. The Ceremony ends when the audience disconnects all the tubes and accessories and puts them away for the next set of participants.

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Installations

The Heart of Prague Quadriennale (June 12-26, 2003) Our first installation of the work was held at the Heart of Prague Quadriennale held from June 12-26, 2003 as part of the sense of Hearing tower. The Heart of PQ space was at the centre of the Industrial Palace in Prague and is shown in the figures below. The space was divided into towers with human sense themes for Sight, Touch, Taste, Smell, and Hearing. The Sound tower is in the centre of the room in upper right of the first image. It consisted of two floors; the lower floor was a sound tunnel much like the ear canal. Student installation works were installed in the sound tunnel for participants to play with generate sounds. These sounds were piped to the Sound Room. Sound was also piped in from all the other sense towers. The following images show pictures from the installation in Prague.

Figure 1: View of Heart of PQ space from the front looking to the left. The Sound Room is the black box on the upper level at the right of the image. The Sight tower is to the left at the back and the Smell tower is at the left at the front of the image.

Figure 2: View of Heart of PQ space from the front looking to the right. The Touch tower is at the back on the right and the Taste tower is at the front to the right.

Figure 3: Close-up of the Sound Room.

Figure 4: Close-up of the tubes entering the Sound Room from below.

Figure 5: Inside the Sound Room showing the Sound Table and the headphones.

Figure 6: People inside sound room connecting tubes.

Figure 7: Close-up of people making connections.

Figure 8: Listeners engaged their whole bodies and helped each other with coordinating the tubes providing an participatory experience while listening.

Figure 9: Close-up of Sound Table.

Figure 10: Close-up of special headphones used by participants. The headphones are hollow with tubes protruding out of them that are attached to the various connectors and eventually to the sound table.

Figure 11: Close-up of connectors that participants used to make different types of connections.

About the Artists (from 2001 description)

Sidney Fels

Sidney Fels received his Ph. D. and M.Sc. in Computer Science at the University of Toronto in 1994 and 1990 respectively. He received his B.A.Sc. in Electrical Engineering at the University of Waterloo in 1988. He was a visiting research at ATR Media Integration \amp Communications Research Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan from 1996 to 1997. He created the Glove-TalkII system that allows a person to speak with their hands. The device was built to be a virtual artificial vocal tract. He also created the Iamascope is an interactive artwork which explores the relationship between people and machines. In Iamascope, the participant takes the place of the coloured piece of glass inside the kaleidoscope. The participant's movements cause a symphony of imagery and music to engulf them. His other artwork includes the Forklift Ballet, PlesioPhone and Video Cubism.

Sachiyo Takahashi

Sachiyo Takahashi studied new philosophy (culture and representation) at the Tokyo University and continued as an assistant there from 1993 to 1996). Her main research was in Japanese traditional theater (Noh theater and Japanese traditional puppet theater Bunraku) and performance in this century focusing on voice and body in performance. From childhood, she has played several Occidental musical instruments and later learned Noh flute from Master Yukimasa Isso for 10 years. She has been deeply involved and influenced by Noh theater. From her interests in the fine combination of sound and action in performance, she created experimental pieces in Tokyo from 1988, applying traditional concepts to develop a new art form. In 1996, she came to Belgium to work with Jan Fabre. She studied theater direction from him and played in three of his works including "Glowing Icons". She has studied electro acoustic composition with Prof. Annette Van de Gorne. In December 1999 she created and performed her sound-action piece "Aviation/Abbreviation" (production: Troubleyn vzw) in Antwerp, Belgium. She is on tour with this production as well as other collaboration in 2001. She has been actively collaborating with artists from different fields, including: Akitsugu Maebayashi, Sidney Fels, Alzek Misheff.

Funding

We gratefully acknowledge our funding sources for this project.

• POLA Foundation, Japan
• Canadian Council for the Arts
• Government of Czech Republic
• Culture 2000 Programme of the European Union

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