LocaleS3 is a sound installation by Michelle Jaffé, Phil Edelstein and David Reeder, awarded a New Works Residency grant from Harvestworks Digital Media to create and exhibit their work in Fall 2023 on Governor’s Island, New York.
Visitors wear smart phones and location tracking headphones which determine their position. Leveraging the system from NOUS Sonic which incorporates Ultra-Wide Band triangulation technology, visitors hear specific sonic movements in virtual 3D sound shapes, as they traverse the space. Each shape is part of the whole, creating the sonic field of discovery.
Each visitor walks a different path, passing through one sound shape to another. In this way, visitors become co-creators of the composition according to how they navigate the space. Engaging the audience thusly, makes them participants in playing the room as an instrument. The more attentive the exploration, the richer the sculptural sonic experience will be. Each scene contains portals at specific locations that switch the visitor from one artist composition to another. LocaleS3 is our first scalable module, using NOUS Sonic technology.
Jaffé created two compositions for LocaleS3. The first composition is a collection of various found sounds she composed to create rhythms, beats and sonorities that coalesce into individual movements, while each work becomes part of the compositional whole called utterances, articulations, manifestations.
For the second work, Jaffé broke down Part 1, of a new, 13:08-minute vocal composition for
GRIFTER’s Gambit (work-in-progress) into 12 smaller compositions and distributed those across 12 virtual 3-D sound shapes. Presented in this way, the composition is non-linear. Each person experiences and composes the work differently from the other.