Sonic Arts Research Centre:
Valhalla for the Human Ear
Walk into the Sonic Laboratory, the concert hall at Belfast’s Sonic Arts Research Centre (SARC), and you know you’ve entered a temple of audio delights. “Essentially, you’re walking into the middle of a vast cube, with sound coming not just from all around you, but from above and below as well”, says Dr. Pedro Rebelo, the Centre’s director of research.
Describing that sound’s sheer immensity and complexity requires a bombardment of specs. All told, 48 independently-controlled channels of audio can be projected from over 60 state-of-the-art speakers positioned anywhere within the cube — from high above you on motorised ceiling panels to far below you under the acoustically transparent floor. Even the reverberation of the space can be fine-tuned to vary from 0.4-2.3 seconds.
Audible Feast
“So it’s fairly unique in its ability for variable acoustics”, says Rebelo, with professorial understatement. In fact, it offers researchers and audiences a listening experience unrivalled anywhere in the world. And controlling it all is a single Power Mac G5 — just one of many in this unique, Mac-only educational institution dedicated to the confluence of music and technology.
Since 2001, the SARC — a very 21st-century fixture on the 150-year-old campus of Queen’s University in Belfast — has been training a new generation of tech-savvy acoustic researchers, recording engineers, sound designers, audiophile computer programmers, electronic composers and performers. “We try to expose them to as many extreme, radical, weird and wacky things as we can think of in the short space of three years”, Rebelo says. “And we use Mac because — well, I’ve never used anything else. The fact is, because of its intuitive appeal to the creative mind, the great majority of sophisticated music and acoustic design applications were developed around the Mac”.
At the Sonic Laboratory, 48 independent channels of audio pipe through over 60 state-of-the-art speakers controlled by a single Power Mac G5.
Acoustic Toolchest
Rebelo cites software like Max/MSP by Cycling74; PD (Pure Data), an open source program developed by computer music pioneer Miller Puckette; and SuperCollider by James McCartney. All of them evolved from groundbreaking research done at IRCAM in Paris in the 1980s. And all of them are powerful programming environments that employ graphical user interfaces as control structures for real-time processing of music, audio and multimedia.
Pedro Rebelo is the director of research at the Sonic Arts Research Centre in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
Put these tools in the hands of SARC students and staff and the results can be unlike anything you’ve ever heard. Today, in ensembles that often combine traditional instruments with PowerBook laptops, in contexts that range from the intricately composed to the completely improvised — and often on the stage of the unique listening environment of the Sonic Laboratory — a new breed of musicians and composers are experimenting with new ways to make music and setting new rules for interaction among band members and between performers and audience.
Group Dynamics
“For example”, says Rebelo, “there’s an ensemble I play in called BLISS, the Belfast Legion for Improvised Sights and Sounds, where a number of PowerBook performers improvise in real time. The laptops are networked together, and we swap data about our various sounds as we’re listening to each other. So — in the same way a jazz ensemble might improvise around an established tune — we develop parameters by which we define sections in the piece. It imposes structure on the improvisation, but in a new and challenging way. The music that’s being made emerges out of the communal exchange of information”.
The circle grows even larger when the band invites the audience to participate. “Recently, we prototyped a system where we gave PDAs to audience members”, says Rebelo. “They used a graphic interface to draw certain shapes, which were then relayed to the musicians’ PowerBook screens. In an abstract way, the score for the piece was being written, in real time, by the audience, and evolving in response to what the musicians were playing”.
Reliable as a Well-Tuned Piano
When not pushing the frontiers of group improvisation, SARC’s sonic explorers are using the Centre’s Mac-studded seminar rooms and studios to pursue a wide range of musical research, recording and composition. They’re working with world-renowned digital signal processing experts on developing precise mathematical models of how strings vibrate, building their own software to develop new types of synthesis, conducting experiments in sound spatialisation and diffusion, composing film and video scores, and designing audio for interactive multimedia games and installations.
Despite the diverse interests of SARC’s faculty and student body, Rebelo emphasises the importance of working and learning within “a context of live performance”, enabled by the availability of the Sonic Laboratory concert hall. “There’s a big difference between sitting alone in a studio and the physical and emotional rush of going on stage and making your ideas work in front of people”, says Rebelo. “And that’s yet another reason for using Macs — their eminent reliability. You don’t want to fear having your instrument crash in front of an audience, and the stability of Mac OS X protects against that”.
