BLACK SONIC HOLE: An immersive and interactive sonic soundscape based on Schwarzschild’s Geodesics for Black Holes.Humanizing the scale of complex singular physical phenomena in the post-digital age.

Resumen

In this manuscript we describe our ongoing efforts to create an electroacoustic sonic object within an interactive/immersive installation based on the first non trivial solution for Einstein’s field equations: Karl Schwarzschild’s singularities, or, as they are better known today, Black Holes. We propose a direct analogy between the simplified geodesics for a light particle in the neighborhood of a static Black Hole unto the limits of the event horizon -which result in the known solutions for gravitational lensing- and the viewer’s own capacity to interact with sound. Our proposed installation generates a sonic soundscape in which the viewer experiences the concepts of spatial curvature and time dilation produced by gravity through analogous distortion to sounds -these may be either refer to harmonic frequencies carefully chosen for the experience or the viewer’s own voice- which comprise a reactive sonic object. The system we have designed encompasses an open software which generates the trajectories and frequency shifts which will be applied to the sonic object, written as a MATLAB script, and a patch in Pure Data/Gem which interprets said information and allows for real-time interaction with the listener through voice, additional analogue devices and effects such as synthesizers and pedals. The software is custom built to the hardware installation itself. It was first developed as a four-channel architecture, allowing for a two-dimensional representation of the position of the sonic object within the soundscape, 94which moves following the curved space geodesic. We are currently further developing our system so that we may apply it to a sound array comprised of many elements, permitting a higher spatial and sonic resolution. We are also shifting the system architecture to a voice of god (v.o.g.) type array, where the sound elements are above the viewer, in order to create a more immersive experience. Recent developments are with eight channels, which add a solid sonic dimension to the system spatialisation during real time performance, and eventually will lead to a 16.2 sonic environment. Through our work we aim to transcend the boundaries separating the fields of art and science, in relation to the concepts of the singularity, the forbidden and the taboo. Indeed, from a physical perspective, one would be pressed to find a better example of forbidden places in nature than Black Holes and their event horizons. The infinitely curved space around these objects could have also been considered taboo within the scientific community in the years prior to their actual discovery; with Einstein himself dismissing them as a mathematical simplification whose implications of a singularity could not carry over to the natural world. The poetics of such physical phenomena in the post digital age are evident through the analogy of the crossing, considering the event-horizon of the Black Hole as a threshold, a door into a point of no return where the commodified theoretical views which have dominated Western thinking and aesthetics for millennia are trapped into the edge of the immense, finding no validity in the current post-human present. This is both the liminal and the taboo: when scientists and artists are not currently fully capable of understanding what lies beyond the event horizon, we choose to leave it to the spectator, as a user of the sonic environment, to draw his or her own conclusions based on the experience, and take the leap. . .