Document:Q11494

Living Wall is an ambient installation collecting, recomposing and playing sonic memories. The computational processes that take place are displayed on four LED arrays with a total number of 3000 white LEDs.
Our work began with a question: what would happen if the surfaces that surrounds us were given memory. The installation has microphones recording fragments of human interaction. Each new recorded fragment is analysed using an adaptive sound categorization technique, determining its relation to previously stored clips.
Based on this analysis, a network of sound clips is formed and reformed in real time. The network of recorded clips is constantly reorganized as new fragments are recorded and connections between previously stored clips are elaborated. The goal of the self-organization is to maintain a topology where fragments with similar perceptual qualities are grouped in clusters and dissimilar clips are separated from each other. As time goes by the network evolves into a rich mass of information with complex interconnections.
Recomposed sequences of sound are played back into the space by walking through the network of sonic memories. The sounds overlap in time and space. They are distributed into the space based on a mapping from the network position to a position in the room. We regard this behaviour as being parallel to the behaviour of how we associate ideas.