Murmur premiered at the NEO Gallery in February 2007 and was selected for the International Computer Music Conference featured performances in Copenhagen in August 2007.

Murmur was developed in the EMMA Lab with additional support from the OSU Arts and Humanities Seed Grant program as a part of a series by Zuniga-Shaw entitled The Living Map.

project: Murmur

Faculty and Staff Researchers:
Norah Zuniga Shaw, Marc Ainger, Matthew Lewis

Description:
Murmur is an exploration of sonic locative immersion. It plays with the notion of sensing place through sound and the construction of place (a cartographic act) through a performer's past and present actions. Murmur seeks to enact a kind of virtuality grounded in experience—the visceral memories sensed through the sounds we encounter and imagine in our journeys through lived environments. The places we have been reside in our tissue and can be re-experienced and re-enacted through sound.

Murmur is built around an infrared vision system that tracks performers' location in three-dimensional space. Position, speed, and the amount of performers' actions control various aspects of the (multi-channel) sound. Sounds and voices recorded from various locations throughout the city (and the airwaves) of Copenhagen are tracked with a GPS device and then mapped to the performance space. The software used for the performance is the ubiquitous Max/Msp/Jitter.

Spring 2007