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Portable environment with spherical sound system, ambient music, and
the voices of the constellations speaking from the right place in the
sky.
You enter a nondescript dome-like hut, find yourself in a cloth room with a soft floor, and music swirling around. As you pay attention you realize the sounds come from all around and the different parts are moving independently, purposefully. As the sounds quiet, you hear a voice telling you a story from some part of the sky. It's the story of one of the constellations. And you may realize it's being told from where those stars are, right now. |
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The system is built in a partial icosahedron (no bottom vertex, so it sits like a geodesic dome), with speakers at each vertex, one directly overhead, five in a ring part way up, five in a ring at the bottom. Custom software controls the placement and motion of sound, and allows for songs to be composed, in up to 8 channels, with the location of sound as an integral part of the composition. I wrote retellings of a small set of star and constellation myths, mainly concentrating on Greek mythology, but with occasional forays into Hindu, Native American, and southern African myths. I rounded up friends to do the voiceover readings for the stories, and then wrote a software module that will do the star math to figure out where the constellation is in the sky at a particular latitude and longitude, and then play the story from there. |
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