Interdisciplinary Encounters 2020

This digital presentation showcases the progress of the work of Philippe-Auber Gauthier, Georges Roussel, and Ana Dall’Ara Majek, and aims to share a series of examples. These examples illustrate how our approach, which we describe as thinking through making, supported by the virtual auralization of prototyped materials, has enabled us to act and communicate rapidly across sectors and disciplines without becoming entangled in disciplinary or taxonomic divisions.

Soundscapes, understood as the assemblage of all the sounds and voices that surround us, are also shaped and organized through the architectures and technologies that amplify sound, carry it, reverberate it, block it, dampen it, capture it, or record it. Walls, windows, doors, and other architectural structures create spaces of acoustic intimacy, sonic arenas. Telephones and other electroacoustic technologies store and transmit voices and discourse, from major diplomatic decisions and stock market transactions to intimate family conversations. These technologies and practices regulate and construct our everyday sonic, oral, and listening cultures. In doing so, they establish and organize systems of power, politics, and decision-making.

What might future transformations of soundscapes and sonic cultures look like? What material or technological developments could interact with our future sonic and oral cultures? With the advent of digital fabrication technologies such as 3D printing, metamaterial technologies have emerged. By definition, metamaterials are engineered materials designed to achieve or create physical phenomena that would otherwise be impossible. In this context, application and design come before the material itself, which is subsequently fabricated to meet the required specifications.

More specifically, acoustic metamaterials are being developed in an increasing number of acoustics laboratories. These digitally fabricated materials derive their properties from their geometric organization, crystal-like structures, resonators, and other engineered features. In relation to sound, they can filter it, bend it through space, impose one-way propagation, process and transform it, and ultimately even subject it to computation, all through passive and purely material means, that is, without computers or machines. They function as a form of material and acoustic algorithm. Acoustic metamaterials thus become purely material entities capable of treating sound waves as data in their immediate physical form.

At larger scales, when integrated into architecture, they may become the shapers and modulators of the soundscapes and sonic cultures of the future. As both a critical detour and a holistic approach to these questions, and with a desire to examine the social and cultural resonances of such structures and objects, we have initiated a research project on acoustic metamaterials that combines sound arts and acoustic engineering. How might such materials and sonic structures, such as acoustic lenses, sculpt and influence sonic cultures and listening environments?

Authors

Philippe-Aubert Gauthier s a professor at École des arts visuels et médiatiques, UQAM. His research is related to sound art, spatial audio, digital arts, Arts+Sciences+Technologies.

Georges Roussel is a postdoctoral fellow in acoustics. His research work is related to spatial audio. He is also active in 3D printing.

Ana Dall’Ara Majek is an active sound artist and composer, working for live performance as composer or as interpreter. She is currently an invited professor at Université de Montréal, Faculté de musique.

Cette publication est également disponible en : Français (French)