making sound-places
How can sound allow us create a sense of place in a digital world?
• 19. March - 16. April 2025
• Online!
• Five-weeks, Wednesdays, 6-8PM CET
• Small class of participants
Artist / Student (Full Time)
€225*
Freelancer
€245*
Professional
€275*
Generous Supporter Ticket
€295*
course
description
Hearing is considered our second most important sense, but the role of sound in shaping our experience of the world is often overlooked. Sound has the uncanny power to radically reframe our other sensations and embed them within spacetime. This makes sound one of the most effective tools for creating a sense of place in physical and digital worlds. Technologies such as headphones along with the Web have transformed the way we perceive our sonic environment. We already live in an augmented sonic reality for much of our waking life. As creatives, artist and designers, we can use sound to construct new sensed places - Sound-Places - accessible from all over the world with only a browser and an internet connection.
This class gives us a set of tools for sonic place-making on the Web. We begin, as sound practitioners always should, by listening. We investigate the sound-places we inhabit using R. Murray Schafer's idea of the Soundscape. We then learn about the basic elements of sound, skipping over the rigour of Western music theory through Daphne Oram's idiosyncratic approach. Once we are able to synthesize sound, we learn about how computers capture, store and play back audio, drawing from sampling approaches with focus on BIPOC artists. We take our sonic toolkit into 3D and learn about composing for places. Finally, we connect our Sound-Places over the Network, learning about digital sound as a tool for shared experiences.
By the end of the course, we will have grasped the fundamentals of analogue and digital sound, learned to program using JavaScript, Web Audio and WebSockets and explored a variety of ideas from music, engineering and ecology. We'll have had an intimate encounter with our sonic environments and discovered tools for creating Sound-Places within digital worlds. We will have created three sound art pieces on the Web, and a collaborative networked composition.
In this course you will be introduced to
Acoustic ecology
Sound synthesis
Sampling
Field recording
JavaScript
Web Audio
WebSockets
course
outline
Week 1: Waves-Spaces
We'll begin by getting to know each other and thinking about how sound shapes our experience of place. We'll learn about composer R. Murray Schafer's ideas from his book ‘The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World’. Equipped with Schafer's concepts, we'll listen & analyse the soundscapes we find ourselves in. By sharing our descriptions, we'll discover the diverse ways we describe our sonic experience.
Week 2: Tension-Release
We'll unpack the fundamentals of sound through Daphne Oram's ideas from her book ‘An Individual Note of Music, Sound and Electronics’. We'll learn what it means to *synthesize* sound. Then we'll begin exploring audio on the Web using the *Tone.js* JavaScript library. We'll learn about oscillators, modulation, envelopes, delay lines and sequencing. By the end of the session, we'll be able to create a simple ambient music piece in the vein of Brian Eno's "Music for Airports".
Week 3: Grain-Textures
We'll investigate how computers record, store and play back sound. We'll discuss sampling and field recording as creative techniques, taking inspiration from sampling culture with particular focus on
BIPOC artists. We'll expand our creative toolkit, learning how to gather samples on Freesound.org, load audio recordings on the Web and mix layers of sounds together to achieve a pleasant & interesting result. By the end of the session, we'll be able to compose a brief sonic story using found sounds.
Week 4: Distances-Directions
In this session we'll explore the basics of spatial audio - from mono through stereo, to simulating three-dimensional sound with standard headphones. We'll learn how we perceive space through sound and how we can draw "sonic images" with Web Audio tools. We'll discuss the challenges of composing for a place, using examples from games and film. At the end, we will use a custom web-based tool called Sharawadji to design a Sound-Place within Google Street View.
Week 5: Signals-Connections
In the last session, we'll take our learnings onto the Network and discover how to make Sound-Places interactive and connected. We'll learn to capture sound from our computer's microphone, analyse it in real-time and use it to send and receive signals from other computers over WebSockets. We'll link up our local Sound-Places to create one big interconnected Place together.
who is this
class for?
Creative folks who want to build digital places, programmers who want to use code to make sound, musicians interested in (non-musical) soundscapes, sound artists keen to work with web technologies. Prior programming experience is helpful but not strictly required. Code examples and 1-on-1 help will be provided if you are struggling with the programming parts.
about online classes
Classes are 'live' meaning that you can directly interact with the instructor as well as with the other participants from around the world. Classes will also be recorded for playback in case you are unable to attend for any reason. For specific questions, please email us and we'll get back to you as soon as we can.
about
scholarships
We are offering a limited number of reduced fee scholarships for this online class for those facing financial hardships. These allow participants to pay a reduced fee and are reserved for women, BIPOC, and LGBTQ+ who otherwise would be unable to attend. To be considered for one of these scholarships, please use this form.
To apply for a reduced fee scholarship, you must fill in the form no later than one week before the course begins. We will not accept any class sign-ups or scholarship applications after this date, as our regular sign-ups will determine the amount of scholarships we can accommodate. We will notify you shortly thereafter if your application has been approved.
We are a small organisation with no outside funding and like many, we are also in survival mode. We depend on tuition fees for reimbursing class instructers, space fees, and operational costs. We ask you to consider this when applying for a reduced fee scholarship. <3
meet the
instructor
Jacub Fiala
Artist, Creative Technologist
Jakub Fiala is a Berlin-based artist and creative technologist, specialising in algorithmic, sonic and interactive art. He particularly enjoys misusing technology to unveil the Realm of the Weird; exposing the machines' delicate innards and making them tell human stories.