By Nicholas Meehan
The distance between every person and the world they perceive, the literal gap that extends to the objects of perception, from a cup on a shelf to a sunset on the horizon, is invisible. And yet everything that matters about being human happens inside of it.
Unlike visual art, sound uses this invisible space to envelop those within it simultaneously, amplifying the one true moment that actually exists. It opens the door to a kind of collective imagination in which each person's vision of what they are hearing is as unique as their identity. The shared sound experience produces independent dreams, and those dreams, when brought into contact with each other, open up possibilities that none of the listeners could have reached on their own. The experience is the shared landscape. The new realities and possible futures that emerge from it belong to everyone who was a part of it.
Everyone is in the same room hearing the same sound, but what happens inside each person is expressly their own. In this space, the sense of sharing and privacy are both real and coexistent. The programs and research at VVSSL work within the dynamics of this experiential tension, exploring what becomes possible within this shared space of perception, particularly through sound.
What Remains
For VVSSL, navigating shared experience in sound involves many considerations, restraint and reduction being central among them. Before conceptualising an experience further, close attention is paid to the weakest points to create experiences built on clarity rather than compensation. Disregarding this can result in burying audible problems beneath decorative noise which might be mistaken for meaning. On the other hand, the same disregard can result in deadening the character of a physical space along with its unique acoustic nature or architecture, ultimately silenced out of existence. As an alternative, our approach is to reveal the elements that are already working and amplify them, allowing space, architecture, and the people within it to become instruments for a sound experience, rather than obstacles to it. Reduction in this sense is not felt as a deprivation, but rather a means to focus and amplify the fundamental forms of the experience which clearly resonate.
This principle runs through all VVSSL developments and programs. Each approaches the same question from a different angle: how to establish the clearest possible channel between artistic framework and those engaged with it. In Cinema Obscura, complete darkness and the absence of screens returns the audience to spatial sound as a primary sense, where darkness becomes the instrument. In the Hexadome, fifty-two channels of spatial audio fill an architecture designed for total immersion, yet the space between screens reveals the stunning backdrop of museums and spaces where Hexadome is presented, while the screens themselves serve as windows into the work of the artist in sound and immersive projection. In Sonic Playground, the space is extended through multiple programs of tactile discovery, opening audiences of all ages to sound as a physical and shared phenomenon. And in Tetra Sonus, the architecture, the acoustics, the sound and the people within the room become the work itself. In each case, what is removed matters as much as the sound designed to connect what remains.
Beyond Sight
The relevance of the unseen has long been intuitively understood by artists working in shared listening environments. Since VVSSL began, our team has been inspired to discover the ways in which scientific literature has begun to catch up to this understanding. We actively engage with institutions whose research is expanding our understanding of what the “empowerment of shared direct experience” means. One of the more remarkable findings we are engaging with relates to cardiac synchrony, which indicates that bodies sharing a space and a sound begin to find each other. Heartrates of individuals within a shared experience will synchronise over time, without words or instruction.
What once seemed mystical turns out to be measurable, verified by instruments and data, illuminating what is happening beyond sight. Realising this, we are keen to expand the spectrum of knowing and meaning beyond words and particularly beyond screens, working with engineers, artists, and designers of sound and experience to create intentional spaces that can be lightly described as sanctuaries of sound. In our research, spatial listening, neuroaesthetics, the sonification of physiological data, and acoustic urbanism are not separate disciplines. These are different ways of asking the same question. What happens in the space between people when intentional sound moves inside it?
Our work is an attempt to answer this question, setting the conditions in which something seemingly magical yet entirely real can happen between people, and trusting that which cannot be seen or fully measured is perhaps what matters most.