Craving - A Spatial Audio Narrative
2006 - ongoing
together with Bernhard Garnicnig
Craving is an experimental production of the late Sarah Kane’s play Crave, intended to be experienced in a public space. We hand out computer devices and headphones, which allow each participant to freely navigate a part of the city. As they explore, they trigger prerecorded dialogue, sound and music tracks on their headphones, which Bernhard and I have placed at specific locations beforehand. This way, the participants experience the place they stroll through together with the play, and both come together to form a rich, interlocking experience.
The technical framework created for Craving measures the location of each participant by means of GPS, and tracks his or her head movements with a compass mounted on the headphones. Using this information, a computer program calculates the binaural (spatial) sound that the listener is going to hear through the headphones. This technology allows us to virtually place snippets of recorded speech and music at specific latitude/longitude coordinates, so that the participant is able to scroll through them as if the voices in the recordings were actually there.
We conceived this work for an open, modernist area in front of Vienna’s United Nations building at the river Danube. In recent years we had the opportunity to stage and present this work at various festivals and exhibitions, such as the 2007 and 2008 Mobile Music Workshops (Amsterdam and Vienna), the 2009 Coded Cultures Festival in Vienna, and, in the summer of 2010, the 16th Symposium for Electronic Arts (ISEA) in Germany.
see the pages taken from Mobile Music Workshop’s catalog (PDF)
see the project website
Listen with headphones!
Voices: Amira Ben-Saoud, Anatol Vitouch, Max Berger, Sarah Rechberger
Supported by: 
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