A Tree Falls

About

A Tree Falls is a multichannel interactive audio installation, a musing on the role of audience proximity in the soundscape compositional process.

A Tree Falls uses ultrasonic sensors to determine an audience’s proximity to the loudspeaker array. When a sensor is triggered, the array outputs glitch material to signify the audience’s potentially destructive interaction. One explores the installation space by walking through and around the loudspeaker array. Upon entering the array, the virtual sound field is disrupted.

The work's namesake is the thought experiment ‘if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?’ A Tree Falls argues that it is not so much a question of the sound’s physical propagation, rather, whether the sound phenomenologically changes if someone is ‘around to hear it.’