Marketing sonic thinking with creative visualization: getting decision-makers to listen

ABSTRACT

Sound artists and musicians understand sound’s impact on health and well-being; their knowledge can make a difference in the planning and construction of healthy cities. As immersive sound experience designers at Charles Morrow Productions LLC, the authors have created numerous installations for health and well-being throughout the world. In our professional experience, however, communicating our knowledge about the importance of sound to visually-oriented professionals who design and manage urban spaces can be a challenge. In this article, we outline our learnings in order to develop principles for visualizing sonic environments that can help decision-makers to listen to and with us. We speculate that such visualizations may aid other sound artists and designers to generate interest for sound among diverse stakeholders.

KEYWORDS:

• Sound art
• experience design
• soundscapes
• visualization
• marketing

Disclosure statement

Williams is a senior associate of Charles Morrow Productions. Charlie Morrow is the founder and creative director of Charles Morrow Productions.

Notes

1. From the singing, whistling, and drumming of medicine men in the Americas and Africa to prescriptions of the Tarantella to cure spider bites in southern Italy, music has long been an important part of healing rituals and folk medicine around the world (Horden 2000). Additionally, modern Western medicine has also documented the use of music and sound in hospital environments since the mid-19th century (Iyendo 2016).

2. Many artists have worked with sound and the city in compelling artistic contexts (e.g. Mark Bain, Janet Cardiff, Peter Cusack, Christina Kubisch, Max Neuhaus, or Georg Klein). Likewise, a number of innovative research initiatives seek to bring artists and urban place-makers together (e.g. the research group Recomposing the City http://recomposingthecity.org, or conferences such as Animating pedestrian zones in the sonic dimension at McGill University https://newcities.org/perspectives-sound-in-the-city-are-you-listening-to-the-world-around-you/or The Role and Position of Sound and Sounding Art in Public Urban Environments at Leiden University https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/news/2016/11/conference–sounds-in-urban-spaces). But let us not confuse these milieus with the world of business, which controls most actual urban development. As we will detail below, we believe sound artists and musicians have the skills to participate directly in the business world where decisions about built environments are made.

3. We have worked in a wide variety of spaces, from museums, planetariums, and restaurants, to corporate building lobbies, public spaces, and hospitals. See www.morrowsound.com for information on specific projects.

4. For this reason, focus groups and prototyping are essential to our approach. People are very different in their sonic tastes.

5. We also shape sonic environments with textile and architectural materials, plants, fountains, and people.

6. See https://morrowsound.com/tech.html for more information on MorrowSound speaker arrays.

7. MorrowSound is one among many systems for producing spatialized audio such as Ambisonics, Dolby Atmos, and Wave Field Synthesis. Unlike these systems, ours emphasizes the vertical dimension (lower speakers are always placed on the floor); does not use metadata (resulting in lower computational expense); and is built around our approach to atmospheres (as discussed later in this article).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christopher A. Williams

Christopher A. Williams (1981, San Diego) makes, curates, and researches experimental music and sound. PhD, Leiden Univesity; BA, University of California, San Diego. As a composer and contrabassist, Williams’s work runs the gamut from chamber music, improvisation, and radio art to collaborations with dancers, sound artists, and visual artists. Williams’ artistic research on improvisation, notation, etc. takes the form of both conventional academic publications and practice-based multimedia projects. He also curates the Berlin concert series KONTRAKLANG and is a senior associate of immersive sound experience makers Charles Morrow Productions. www.christopherisnow.com

Charlie Morrow

Charlie Morrow (b. 1942 Newark, New Jersey, USA), is a conceptualist whose music and sound work explores many styles and forms, from events for media and public spaces to commercial soundtracks, new media productions, museum installations and programming for broadcast and festivals. Throughout his career, Morrow has sought to bring experimental sound and music to a wider audience. His works have ranged from massive free public events for New York Harbor to innovative installations for the world’s leading institutions, including Kennedy Space Center, and the American Museum of Natural History. Morrow’s work at the forefront of the rapidly-expanding field of 3D sound has been showcased at major venues and events, including the 2006 Torino Winter Olympics and Nationwide Children’s Hospital, Columbus OH. www.morrowsound.com