AES Show 2024 NY

Bestiari, by artist Carlos Casas1, is a spatial audio installation created as the Catalan pavilion for the 2024 Venice Art Biennale. The installation was designed for ambulant visitors and the use of informal seating arrangements distributed throughout the reproduction space, so the technical installation design did not focus on listeners’ presence in a single “sweet-spot”. While high-quality conventional spatial loudspeaker arrays typically provide excellent surround-sound experiences, the particular challenge of this installation was to reach into the proximate space of individual, dispersed and mobile listeners, rather than providing an experience that was only peripherally enveloping. To that end, novel spatial audio workflows and combinations of reproduction technologies were employed, including: High-order Ambisonic (HoA), Wavefield Synthesis (WFS), beamforming icosahedral (IKO), directional/parametric ultrasound, and infrasound. The work features sound recordings made for each reproduction technology, e.g., ambient Ambisonic soundfields recorded in Catalan national parks combined with mono and stereo recordings of specific insects in that habitat simultaneously projected via the WFS system. In-situ production provided an opportunity to explore the differing attributes of the reproduction devices and their interactions with the acoustical characteristics of the space – a concrete and brick structure with a trussed wooden roof, built in the late 1800s for the Venetian shipping industry. The practitioners’ reflections on this exploration, including their perception of the capabilities of this unusual combination of spatial technologies, are presented. Design, workflows and implementation are detailed.