Re-Mediating Shapefiles: Listening to Lakes
In residency at the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Minnesota, I used bathymetric outlines for Minnesota’s 10,000 lakes to inspire a sound performance and gallery installation. I was motivated by the increasingly-urgent long-term drought in the American West seen through the eyes of a region in which fresh water is abundant, but also in need of protection. While in residency, I collaborated with the University’s Spatial Innovation Lab and the “U-Spatial” community.
Manipulate GIS shapefiles of Minnesota lake outlines into musical scores that I can play with an instrument called a waterphone.
The Problem
The waterphone is loaded with water, eliciting resonating and reverberating tones when played with a bow or a mallet. Listen to a quick sample here:
Given the conceptual aim of the project—to acknowledge and respect fresh water resources—I wanted to load the waterphone with Minnesota lake water, so I traveled to 6 lakes and collected water from them.
Collecting Lake Water
I placed the jars of lake water on this pedestal. In live performances, I walked over to the pedestal and filled the instrument with water from the lake whose score I read and played.
The Scores
My first scribble in Illustrator to get a sense of what form the scores might take.
Based on this sketch, I wanted to vary line weight to get at the complexity of sounds produced by the waterphone instrument.
I exported the state of Minnesota’s Lake Bathymetric Outlines shapefiles as SVGs, then used Illustrator to manipulate the linework into scores.
This video is an edited time-lapse showcasing the main action points of how I made 1 of the 6 scores.
The Final 6 Scores
User Experience
With the water collected and the scores produced, I designed the installation space to create a seamless user experience. The instrument’s sound was the centerpiece, but I wanted all elements in the room to join together so that 1) the material is confined, 2) a gesture is made, 3) the elements and their connections are legible to visitors, and 4) the experience communicates something useful and/or powerful to the users.
Music stands are spaced out around the room so that people can wander around and look at the scores.
Users (visitors) take a score from a music stand in the installation space, then deliver it to me.
The guiding concept of the installation was to render visible the relationship between places like Minnesota, with nearly immeasurable fresh water, and the arid Western U.S., which is in a major long-term drought.
To point toward this idea, I paired a series of historical aerial photos of the lakes I visited with my photos of Lake Mead at the Nevada-Arizona border.
After receiving the score, I brought the waterphone to the table and filled the instrument with the appropriate water from the lake-score requested by the visitor.
Once loaded with the collected lake water that aligns with the score selected by the visitor, I then play that score, and the visitors can “listen” to the lake speak.
Mistakes in the Design Process
In this drawing, I had not yet anticipated how I want people to move through the space after they enter the door.
Namely, one problem with this rendering is the amount of empty floor space left in the room. Here I’m imagining “stations,” where users move to the music stands (on the left), then deliver the score they want to hear to the performer.
But this encourages blockage of flow in the room, and unnecessarily concentrates where users spend most of their time in the exhibition space.
I wanted more of a dispersed pattern, a meandering feeling.
And so ultimately ended up with this room arrangement.
After consulting with A/V specialists in the U of Minnesota’s Media Services department, we concluded the live sound would be best if the speakers both pointed outward from where the performer was standing.
We introduced large, thick, hanging cloths at the opposite end of the room to dampen the sound.
I collaborated with a musician to design the technical sound system. The tricky challenge is that I wanted to 1) amplify the waterphone during live performances, 2) modulate the sound as I played live, and 3) record the sound with fidelity to how it sounds when played live.
Sound Tech Planning
Draft 1
Final Draft
To do this, we worked in Miro boards to map out the flow of sound and electricity through the system.
Some of the equipment involved included: dynamic microphones, 2 mixers, pre-amp, modulation pedal, amplifier, recording laptop, monitor, and the speakers. There were no less than 8 types of cables and connections.
Performance Documentation
Edited Album
Part of my design philosophy is to keep iterating and keep making.
So I turned all my live performance recordings (about 25 hours) into an album with 6 tracks, one for each score.
These are not raw recordings, but rather are entirely re-mixed, essentially making 6 new songs that didn’t exist before.
This became a CD that I sold an an art gallery in Minneapolis during a solo exhibit I had there.
Listen to the album here
One of my Adobe Audition files showing how I layered different sound clips to form part of 1 track.