After receiving her master’s degree in computational linguistics from the University of Tübingen, Bela Usabaev started working as a junior research engineer on audio and speaker search applications at Fraunhofer IAIS in Sankt Augustin. After being dedicated to statistical speech synthesis and statistical modelling of speech research, Bela is now studying media art at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, working with speech and voice in sound installations. Currently she is a research associate at the Film University Babelsberg, developing 3D sound and sound algorithms for a mixed-reality web application in the digital cultural heritage domain
Report during the symposium:
SYNTHETIC SOUND
My presentation is about the possible sonifications of Earth’s data, from the stratosphere to Earth’s interior and the in-between layers and spaces. I am proposing a sound experience that sonifies the different forces of nature, hereby enabling unforeseen and unusual new connections that we can observe in the wake of the climate change. Examples of exceptional natural connections might be a water mass running through a city, a burning forest, and an ocean developing a tsunami wave, but can also be the winds in the stratosphere, the heat of Earth’s interior, and familiar sounds, the sounds of the forest, the sounds of the sea, and the sounds inside the body. These sounds are researched as possible sonic spaces that create differing perceptions of Earth. Unusual juxtaposition of sound will be used to explore sonic spaces that may become possible in the future of climate change. To assess the sounds, I propose a mobile communication platform based on a sound installation: a structure connecting the participants via headphones and microphones, ideally to be realized as a procession in public spaces to connect the physical presence of the participants with the sounds they perceive.
International Committee to Save the Earth Through Speculative Fabulation
Dovilė Aleksaitė, Fee Altmann, Sanja Anđelković, Elisabeth Brun, Belén Cerezo, Suvam Das, Damian Domes, Raquel Felgueiras, Kausik Ghosh, Florian Goeschke, Vanessa Graf, Anouk Hoogendoorn, Kristin Johnsen, Paul R Jones, Dani Landau, Stacy Lo, Madhuja Mukherjee, Roksana Niewadzisz, Christine Reeh-Peters, Marie-André Robitaille, Gonzalo H. Rodriguez, Szilvia Ruszev, Sanja Särman, Marie Louise Juul Søndergaard, Alisi Telengut, Bela Usabaev, Joshua Wagner, Lisa Walder, Dörte Weig