soundwalk – CoSiMa

Murmures Urbains @ Chalon dans la rue 2015

CoSiMa has participated with Murmures Urbains at 2015 edition of the festival Chalon dans la rue from June 24 to 26.

The Orbe collective has presented three experimental scenarios of augmented soundwalks. The participants equipped with a smartphone are invited to experience an augmented audio reality that reacts on their position, trajectory and movement (using GPS, BTLE beacons and motion sensors). Each scenario proposes a different narrative and leads the participants on different possible trajectories through the same district of Chalon-sur-Saône. The trajectories take between 30 minutes and 2 hours depending on the participants’ preference and their engagement with the proposed activities.

The trajectories of all participants have been recorded and visualized on a screen at the arrival point where the team invited the participants to a debriefing of their experience.

Sonosphere @ Confluences

Orbe designed and implemented Sonosphere for the Confluence museum that opened at the end of 2014 in Lyon. Sonosphere is an immersive sound experience deployed indoor and outdoor. The visitor navigates through the voices that inhabit the areas of the museum with a mobile device. Sonosphere at the Confluence museum allows the visitor to explore the sound memory of the museum, to discover spaces behind the scenes, and to access other hidden dimensions.

As part of the CoSiMa project, Sonosphere integrates 3D-sound technologies provided by IRCAM. Visitors are solicited by spatialized voices that seem to come from the art pieces, columns or walls. HRTF filtering enables spatial localization of sound sources. The visitors are continuously geolocated through a Bluetooth LE beacon network that equips the 20,000 m² of the museum, and we use the smartphone inertial sensors to get an idea of the orientation of the visitors within the space. Display free mode allows the visitors to navigate with their ears. This intuitive interface is close to natural listening and thus requires no learning.

With this geolocation and binaural sound processing, Sonosphere adds a sound layer to the museum spaces. The sounds no longer belong to the headphones, but are truly part of the environment.

Murmures Urbains

Orbe created Murmures Urbains, an emerging fiction built on the principle of post-narrative writing. Firstly, a staging based on protocols creates multiple situations outbreaks in the public space. Secondly, the traces and testimonies from these experiments are collected in a scenic area. In the epilogue course and stories are presented in an exhibition space.

Murmures Urbains is a rich context to experiment situated medias. The framework used for these experiments is a foreshadowing of the Cosima platform. With Medias-Situés, you can associate media with a combination of trigger constraints : space conditions, time, environmental or behavioral. The device also allows you to synchronize events between multiple mobile, manage spatial sound or hybridize remote areas. Murmures Urbains has been deployed in several contexts : workshops in art and design schools, such as ENJMIN (National School of Video Game and Interactive Media), during festivals and events like Chalon dans la Rue.

Murmures Urbains will be in residence at L’Hôpital Ephémère in April 2015 and will be presented at Chalon dans la Rue festival in July 2015.