Christopher Janney: Acoustic Architecture
The Sonic Forest is an inspiring audio installation that is controlled by Apple hardware. It encourages people to interact with their environment and each other, and creates beautiful, open-score music in the process.
Making music physical; making architecture more playful and interactive; making public spaces more beneficial to the people who use them — these are all goals aspired to by performance architect Christopher Janney. The result is a series of exhibitions and events based on acoustic architecture and physical sound (among them, the currently touring Sonic Forest) that exploit Janney’s highly creative disposition — and they all run on the Mac platform.
Sonic Forest is currently doing the festival circuit in Europe, having stopped off at The Wireless and Hyde Park Calling gigs in the UK, and bound for events in Holland and Spain. It is, in short, a collection of 16 eight-foot by 10-inch hollow columns, each containing audio speakers, photo sensors and lights. Janney regards the columns as instruments; the musicians, or players, are the people who walk past or interact with the columns, triggering a fascinating array of sounds, effects and melodies that evoke everything from the rain forest to underwater environments to concert halls. “It’s all harmonically related”, explains Janney, “so it can never sound like monkeys jumping on a piano — we can keep a certain mix of acoustical and environmental sounds working together”.
Sonic Forest runs off a 1.5GHz PowerBook G4 via a custom interface developed in the Cycling ’74 Max audio programming environment and making use of Propellerhead’s Reason. Janney explains: “Audio collected by 64 sensors is converted to MIDI, which then enters the PowerBook running the Max software. The latter controls a series of hits, or sound banks, whereby different environmental and melodic sounds are triggered. The result is then fed to 16 different amplifiers that go back out to the speakers in the Forest”.
Janney stakes his reputation on the Mac’s stability and performance — the PowerBook is central to the installation and needs be up and running for days on end, often in a very warm environment. “To drive Sonic Forest, we just use the hard drive inside the PowerBook”, he says. “In development, we use a lot more space but once it’s crunched down, we can run it on the Mac notebook and, so far, it’s looking really good. One of the things I really like about the Mac is it never crashes”.
Janney studied architecture at Princeton in the 1970s, while also studying jazz in New York. He says: “My aim has always been to somehow fuse music and architecture in new and different ways. Sometimes I’m trying to make architecture more like music, other times I try to make music more visual — for example, I did a piece where Mikhail Baryshnikov danced to the sound of his own heartbeat”.
He adds: “That’s where you find new ideas, when you synthesize previously unrelated disciplines. People think about architecture as very static, permanent and strictly visual, and music as ephemeral, and never really there. I’m trying to push those things together to find a doorway into a new creative place”.
Janney also graduated from MIT, which is where he first encountered Apple technology. He says: “We found we could work much more easily with the Mac and I’ve never had a reason to change; to get what we want and to get it as stable as we want, we’ve always stuck with Apple”.
“People think about architecture as very static, permanent and strictly visual, and music as ephemeral, and never really there. I’m trying to push those things together to find a doorway into a new creative place.”
He adds: “We always need faster computers, and Apple has always moved at a fast enough pace for us, especially with the new MacBook Pro”.
Janney also makes full use of Apple technology in the development phase of his work. “One of my earliest installations, Soundstair, ran on an Apple IIe and we started using the Mac for development as early as 1985. Since 1991, we’ve developed exclusively on the Mac platform with Cycling ’74 Max — we’ve developed permanent architectural projects using Power Mac G4s and G5s with both Max and Reason as well as Max/MSP”.
“Throughout, I’ve found the Mac to be extremely reliable and bullet-proof. For development, my programmers have always preferred Macs for this kind of work, especially the music side, since there’s great support within the industry”.
One of the most appealing aspects of Apple’s technology, as far as Janney is concerned, is the degree to which its flexibility facilitates the interactive nature of his work. He says: “If I have new ideas, we can integrate them. That’s one of the great things about the technology — it allows us to say: ‘Why don’t we put a riddle in here, so that if people walk in a certain pattern, the computer will spit back some dense piece of sound and light’. That’s all down to the technology”.
But why is interactivity so important? “Work like the Sonic Forest is really about what I call my ‘urban musical instruments’ — trying to make environments that can become a part of cities that allow people to literally play with the architecture”.
“The great thing about interactive technologies is they allow people to have a sense of participation in their environment. As an architect, my interest is to help people feel less alienated — especially in urban situations. Putting interactive environments in cities is a foil really, it’s a way of encouraging total strangers to interact and participate in a more benign social environment”.
Sonic Forest will return to the UK in December 2007, in Nottingham, and a book of Janney’s work, entitled Architecture of the Air, will be published in September of the same year.
