ReSilence aims to support the following four main Pilot Use Cases (PUCs).
| 1. Musical Experience Design |
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| Concerts are much more than just the music they feature. Technology brings new ways of enabling participation in concerts– on site and remote. This enables the broadening and deepening of audience experience. |
Description: New technologies radically challenge the traditional position of the listener and its infrastructure but also, the composers and musicians and the technologies they employ. First, concert halls, opera houses, theaters and other performance spaces are architectural landmarks in many cities. They offer spaces where urban communities meet and share meaningful experiences.Therefore, in this use case artists in collaboration with technologists, scientists, architects and designers will explore new ways of designing musical and dance performances as well as interactive, performative spaces and environments, both physical and XR-enhanced by using audience interactivity as a medium for generating sonic material.
| 2. The New Silence (Sound and Mobility) |
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| Electric cars are introducing a new silence in the city. How we can design the interior/exterior car sound, as a combination of ambiance and an audio interface in order to improve security and quality experience in mobility. |
Description: With the industrial revolution came the machines, and this was a kinetic revolution dominated by mechanics in motion. Sound design is approached as a user-centric experience. Former functional sounds may become engines of creativity. While electric cars can be a white canvas for composers who can design sounds that we haven‘t heard yet, the car can also become a performance art installation where the driver is the composer/ performer. Audio reflectivity of surfaces may be considered in redesigning parts of the urban space, and affect the selection of construction materials. Indoor acoustic design is a field explored by architects and artists looking at sound resonances and the way our bodies move through spaces, creating our own sounds. It is time to apply this knowledge to places of public use, like restaurants, subway, train stations, etc. These places can be considered as music instruments, receive design interventions and the quality of their absorption and reflectivity will determine their impact on people.
| 3. Sound of Urban Spaces |
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| One aspect affecting the quality of urban life is sound. Analogous to visual city planning, a soundscape approach can be applied in order to analyse the form and sound of existing spaces, measure its quality and effects on citizens. |
Description: The problem of noise pollution is a serious challenge in urban areas. Soundscape design has been an issue in city-planning over the last years; there are still tools and methods needed to shape the sound of spaces to ensure public well-being, and for the time being we do not look enough towards the potential solutions provided by artists. We aim towards building tools and techniques that will allow architects and urban designers to address the issue of noise pollution in various scales, led by innovative thinking by sound artists. This will require simulations and fabricated prototypes in small sections of the urban environment, where few individuals are involved, and gradually expand to larger areas of cities and communities of citizens.
| 4. Full-body sound experience |
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| Sound is experienced not only through our ears. New methods and tools (e.g. wearables) can support a full-body experience of music and sound. This opens new ways for music creation and perception while may also help people with hearing (and vision) impairment. |
Description: Through vibration and tactile sensation, we can achieve a “new way of hearing” and through sound we can find “new ways of seeing”. This use case will focus a) on the importance of a full-body approach to experiencing music and sound as opposed to engaging solely the ears and b) on the translation of physical objects into soundscapes and vibrations, inspired by artists such as Christine Sun Kim. A possible application/impact could be with people who are hearing or visually impaired. In this use case we are going to explore new ways that can reinvent technologies as tools in order to increase our senses, and feed sound and visual information through other parts of the body by bypassing the impaired areas (eyes, ears), thus providing a more complete spatial experience.