An exploration of corporeal perceptual awareness in sonic environments

As an artist, I have created a number of interactive sonic environments that seek to provide a truly unique outcome for each person. The audible domain provides an intuitive, experiential, visceral, instinctive, spontaneous and intimate perceptual habitat where the human body is central, where the visceral engagement with sonic architectures dismisses the western mind-body split as hopelessly inadequate. Do we really only listen with the mind and not the body? The interactive sound environment presents a unique articulation of space and place, one in which the fluidity of the human body can be empowered to find new ways of engaging with environment. This unique and many faceted approach appoints space itself as a performative medium, instructing the user in new ways of listening, whilst simultaneously casting the listener as performative agent. The interactive sound environment establishes a causal loop in which the individual comes to consider the way in which the environment conditions their behavior, and conversely their behavior conditions the environment. Questions of preferential behavior and preferential environments come into play in a manner that is simply not available with in an installation environment that uses pre-recorded and/or triggered content. This essay discusses a number of works developed by the author, using them to illustrate strategies that provide direct visceral and almost tactile engagement with what is otherwise a very abstract sonic and architectural space.