Your Hearing Them
Symposium:
- ISEA2016: 22nd International Symposium on Electronic Art
- More presentations from ISEA2016:
Session Title:
- Hearing, Listening, Participating
Presentation Title:
- Your Hearing Them
Presenter(s):
Venue(s):
Abstract:
Your Hearing Them is a new artwork of wearable technology which allows audiences to translate their experience to others. Specifically, it focuses on the experience of hearing one’s own voice. The experience of hearing one’s own voice is unique to the speaker. When one speaks, they hear the sound as it reflects off the surfaces of the room, and then returns to their ears — as everyone else does. However, the skull of the speaker is resonated by the vibration of the vocal cords, creating a deeper, and more embodied experience of their own voice.
This additional element causes the speaker to hear their voice differently than how others hear it, and creates the foreignness of hearing one’s voice recorded and played back. That lack of body and bass often provokes a reaction of ‘Is that really what I sound like? What this piece enables is for an audience to experience someone else’s voice — the way they do. This talk outlines the development, design, and production of Your Hearing Them, and will also discuss the wider context of this piece, and the main themes of the author’s PhD thesis.
This piece is one in a series of works that develop a meta-perceptual approach, which focus on the experiential qualities of the audience as a tool for the analysis and creation of new sound works. Specifically, the metaperceptual approach redirects the audience’s attention back onto themselves through the materials of the work, making the audience aware of some element of their experience and perceptual apparatus.