Yesterday, October 11th, 2018, was the Herberger Institute’s second annual “Herberger Day”, which featured dozens of workshops hosted from faculty and students from different fields like painting, ceramics, music, dance, design, and acting. One of the best parts about this event is that Herberger students are given the opportunity to participate in workshops that may be completely outside their comfort zone, but broaden their perspective on the unlimited number of possibilities that the arts possess.
The Acoustic Ecology Lab hosted a workshop yesterday from 3-4 pm, titled “Listening and Creative Placemaking”, which featured a soundwalk led by Anne-Marie, a demonstration of our VR headsets led by Kyle and myself, and a poster presentation/discussion led by Jake. The goal of this workshop was to introduce people to the different ways that listening can make us more aware of our environment and help us to develop a deeper connection with ourselves, other people, and our planet.
We started the workshop with a short introduction from each member of the lab, and we swiftly shifted to an introduction to listening and a stationary listening exercise influenced by John Cage’s “4’33″”. Right off the bat, everyone in the audience was intrigued by how many sounds we were able to hear in the room we were in, including orchestral music sneaking its way through a wall to our right, a vehicle’s brakes making their way through the glass windows to our left, and the sounds of human movement reverberating in the concrete hallway outside of our room. One participant’s comments on the listening exercise included a remark on how the sounds coming from the hallway have him clues as to how large the hallway was and what kind of surfaces it was made of (tile and concrete). I thought this comment was particularly interesting because for many people, these types of clues are difficult to derive during someone’s first time deeply listening.
After the stationary listening exercise, we split our participants into two groups — one went with Anne-Marie on her preplanned soundwalk, and the other group stayed in the room that we were in and took turns remotely listening to different acoustic ecologies, via our VR headsets (two new Oculus Rifts and one with a Samsung phone). Everyone was highly impressed with our VR captures and expressed feelings of relaxation and calmness after using the headsets. After everyone had gotten time remotely listening and talking to Jake about our poster, we switched the groups and had the other half of our participants interact with the headsets. The results were almost the exact same for both groups — a feeling of excitement, calmness, and awe after each person returned to “reality”.
For our closing speech, Anne-Marie led a short recap of the different activities that everyone was able to experience and got a few more comments from the audience about what they learned about listening, soundwalking, and their thoughts on using virtual reality to remotely listen. Overall, the feedback was overwhelmingly positive, and many people were eager to learn more about what we do in the lab and how they could potentially get involved. I had some business cards with me for the Soundwalk program, and by the end of the event, I had none left! All-in-all, yesterday was yet another proudly successful day for the lab, and we are excited to continue onward.