Larghissimo
Location
Lisbon, Portugal
About
Larghissimo is an immersive, participatory sound installation about space-time, produced by the platform Eufonia in collaboration with the Instituto de Astrofísica e Ciências do Espaço (IA). Presented at Estúdio Prisma in Lisbon, it formed part of a collective exhibition on the theme of time, placing art and science in dialogue. Visitors used their movement through the space to interact with the sound, in an installation that took gravitational time dilation as its starting point.
The installation set out to represent gravitational time dilation in sound: just as time runs more slowly the deeper one sits within a gravitational well, the audio was made to run more slowly close to the listener and faster further away. Each loudspeaker was driven with its own signal, and the time — the speed — of that signal was both speaker- and listener-dependent, so that a visitor's own position continuously reshaped the flow of time they heard across the space.
For this installation, Sonores Acoustics developed the interactive tracking and spatial audio system that made this possible. A custom application, built in Max/MSP, used UV vision to track the position of multiple visitors within the installation space. The user could add a camera, define the visitor area directly on the camera view, and the software then corrected for the camera's viewing angle, transforming the observed area into a rectangular grid and outputting the x/y coordinates of each visitor in real time. These coordinates drove an audio engine that set the time dilation of each loudspeaker's signal as a function of its distance to each listener, rendering the varying flow of time through a multi-channel loudspeaker array.
The work brought together real-time computer vision, spatial audio and a scientific research context in a single participatory installation.
Artists: ARARA, Atelier Francesco, Matthias Dziwak, Rijk Kruijer, William Primett. Produced by Eufonia in collaboration with the Instituto de Astrofísica e Ciências do Espaço (IA).
