“It’s kind of like listening to a 5.1 movie,” artist Ben Houge explains, pausing for a moment to move through his almost-finished installation at Axiom Center for New and Experimental Media that opens tonight. “As you move through the space the balance will kind of change.”
Ambient sounds flow from six speakers in the small, stark space, each of which filter in select frequencies of sound from the subway just through the wall (Axiom is located right inside the Green Street T stop in Jamaica Plain).
“It has a sense of the rhythms of the comings and the goings of the train,” Houge explains. “And it’s an ideal place to show this piece because there is a natural ebb and flow with the way the trains are kind of coming and going.”
Right as he says it the sound grows in intensity– a train is entering the station.
The exhibit, appropriately named Kaleidoscope Music functions through an algorithm that filters sound from the environment and processes it in real time. The sound you hear is not altered, per se, but the algorithm only allows certain frequencies to enter through each speaker. This, in turn, transforms the sound of the subway into something more like music. Because of the way the algorithm is written there is always an element of randomness– an exact sequence of sounds will never occur twice.
Check out a similar project Houge installed in the True Color Museum in Suzhou, China that involved 18 channels of video and four channels of audio, all algorithmically deployed in real-time from a network of nine computers.
Self-Portrait, Dusk, at the Point of Departure (live footage) from Ben Houge on Vimeo.
The sound suddenly picks up, swooping and dancing excitedly.
“That’s what you get when they say ‘Attention, passengers! The next orange line train to Forest Hills is now approaching,’” Houge explains.
Standing in the installation, the mood of the subway takes hold of you.
And that’s the intent. Houge says he hopes people will take in his installation the same way they might take in a day from a park bench.
“There’s no set time that you need to be sitting on a park bench,” he explains. “You can enjoy it for as long or as little as you like. I think in composing this piece I was trying to mimic the evolution of natural processes of like wind or time of day or waves in the ocean. I like the idea of something that ebbs and flows and you can just kind of come and sit for as long as you want.”
It’s this ability to create an environment and an overall feeling correspondent to a place that has obsessed Houge. Since 1996 he’s been doing audio and sound design for video games, and now he’s teaching a class in it at Berklee. In a way, he sees sound design for video games as a sort of smaller scale sound installation.
“I have to kind of create a sonic environment that’s going to respond to whatever the player does,” he explains. “It’s like a composition that’s driven by another phenomenon and it’s very much the way that game soundtracks are organized. You have to compose something so that it behaves in a predictable way but how it actually behaves is driven by something else.”
The Axiom exhibition also features digital prints of Houge’s series 29 Giraffes all derived from photographs of neon lights in Shanghai. Houge separates out certain segments of the image and sort of sandblasts them across the canvas with a program called Max/MSP. In the same way that the subway installation morphs mundane sound into harmony, these images take everyday shots and scramble them into something beautiful.
“The aesthetic is about finding wonder in the world around us,” Houge explains. “I’m trying to find the beautiful patterns in neon lights or the beauty in the rhythm of the subway. I hope I can build an association between the rhythms of the subway and the rhythms of the wind or other kinds of natural processes.”
[Kaleidoscope Music AXIOM Center for New and Experimental Media. Opens tonight 6-9 p.m. Runs through Nov. 6. 141 Green Street, Jamaica Plain. axiomart.org]
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