Sound and Experience Design - Krakow (PL) Berlin (D)

info@soundexperiencedesign.com
Sound and Acoustic Research, Media and Experience Design for the Human Habitat

Sound and Acoustic Research, Media and Experience Design for the Human Habitat
acoustics / sound spaces / environmental sound modules / environmental sound design / responsive environments / multisensory design / experience design

Lorenzo Brusci has set up a network of professionals converging on the idea of conceiving and re-designing human habitats through environmental interaction design, media design, sound composition and site specific acoustics researches. The creation of multi-sensory contexts of experience is our main goal.

Italian sound and experience designer Lorenzo Brusci is the founder of the concept music group Timet (1993, www.timet.org) and, with gardener Stefano Passerotti, of the Environmental Design Team Giardino Sonoro (2004, www.giardinosonoro.com). In September 2007, he founded in Krakow (PL) and Berlin (D) the studio SED, Sound and Experience Design (www.soundexperiencedesign.com).

Team’s main professional profile:

- city noise masking: creating sound enhanced areas where detaching pedestrians from the invasiveness of city media and mechanical noises;

- city multi-sensory oasis design, both in lanscape/naturalistic and architectural sites;

- experience design for city planning, street furnituring, media street signals and urban areas renovations;

- environmental acoustics, architectural spaces partitioning, absorbent shapes;

- comfort design and multi-sensory design for hospitals and rehabilitation centers: creating special luminous and sonorous habitats for waiting rooms, laboratories, confinement areas requiring particular cognitive multi-sensory stimulations – as for terminal patients or specific surgery spaces;

- industrial development of sonic and luminous modules for public and private architecture;

- didactic workshops dedicated to ‘personnel training in environmental acoustics’;

- home acoustic comfort and customized sound interventions: immersive design solutions for private housing;

- customized sound design and sound diffusion design for concerts and special public events;

- site specific multi-sensory interventions and media exhibiting design;

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Some theoretical notes.

A MULTISENSORY URBAN GARDEN,
THE AWARENESS OF A CULTURAL LANDSCAPE

Starting from a more phenomenological description of how people experience cities in terms of functionalizing behaviour, we proceed to communicate the need for a wider cultural landscape embodied in a contemporary city. Prime examples of this communication process are Sonic Gardens: opportunities of sound and media contents as a way in to change people’s perception in otherwise unwelcoming environments. In this work we will discuss the definition of the intended experience (silence/soundscape vs. noise) and the tools for designing it.

Sound and Experience Design is a team of professionals converging on the idea of designing human habitats through sound composition, site specific acoustic interventions, environmental interaction and media design.
The creation of multi-sensory areas is our main goal. A combination of symbolic contents and environmental design tools articulated in order to support a revolutionary experience design [0]: to provide continuous stimulation to people’s perceptual awareness of the modern city, rising critical and aesthetic filters against the invasion of cultural and mechanical noises. The emerging alternative we propose, with its various and unconventional experiences, is an ecologic stance in favour of the new city, towards the definition of a positive “culturescape” -here and in the following, “culturescape” will mean the intellectual and practical synthesis of the relations stratified and weaved between human settlements infrastructures, human relations, cultural relations and productions and their distributions.

A sonic garden becomes then a multisensory urban oasis, where the spatial, temporal and behavioural aspects merge. It is the re-definition of an open space transfigured by media and experience design: a pervasive environmental responsiveness design and the planning of a perceivable, liveable, sharable symbolic context.
In this sense, the multi-sensory environment and the dynamic public ritual that takes place in an open public space is the focus of our investigation.
We everyday experience walking in the street, willing to achieve a specific strategic and geographic aim, while surrounded by noise and wide a-systematic media sources. There is a carnival of colours, shapes, redundant information and mass actions to face and restructure. We are immersed in a genuine context of aggression. We usually react to this by performing functional actions, strict and “purpose oriented”, acting out a combination of required/provided functions in a closed/familiar environment, reducing complexity and shocks, lowering and often annihilating the incidence of the potential richer and wider culturescape.
Our design intervention on the urban environment aims to restructure citizens’ aspiration for a fully functional city, designing experiences that suggest alternative contexts, allowing for surprises and unpredictable encounters, time stretching epiphanies and alternative intimacies. We achieve this by designing immersive media contents, surrounding the visitor and capturing his attention, playing with and de-contextualizing information and narratives, interpreting the past and present history of city paths and spaces, devising street signals allowing new understanding and stunning interpretations. All these tools can enhance and increase the intensity of the communal experience, stimulating a strong critical approach and a wider perceptual awareness. Between the subject and ‘an intended place’ there are other places, other stories, stratified suggestions and heritages, persons, not simulacrums of presences (and of their inter-relationships). There are other people, with their shared attitudes and goals. Before, after, during the journey towards a location, an event, a place, a building or an advised dangerous area, there’s the possibility to live alternative experiences. If we let them talk, affect us, we sending and receiving environmental messages, walking unpredictable paths, enriching our daily/night “culturescape”.

Urban life in a contemporary city is a set of human intentions and actions of
extreme complexity. Both public and private cultural strategies, as well as
economic and security considerations determine the entire system of urban
reality. The intentions, the goals and the actions they set in motion, is a set of dynamic categories which weave a dense network of motions, representing the physical and symbolic fabric of a contemporary city. The vital cultural richness of a city can be defined as the unpredictable and surprising ability to facilitate dimensions of alternative and fantastic experiences, transforming
the artistic fracture in everyday life, into a continuously accessible
(im)possibility. Here the wider culturescape includes any social and structural stratification in the effort to break the material and functional mechanism of stadardized actions (from driving a car to waiting for a bus, lining for a ticket or being admitted to a hospital ward).We believe that iconography of presences, choreography of motions, dramaturgy of sound memories and music fantasies should suggest contextual behaviours and experiences able to immaterially re-conceive urban sites, triggering alternative attitudes to experiencing places and spaces, overcoming the caption-like references of traditional street and media information signals.

The cultural premise which moved us to design multisensory areas, such as Sonic Gardens, is the awareness that the category of human actions accomplishing a goal within a sharable arc of time is not a closed one and necessarily admits actions to be diverted towards other areas of public and personal knowledge. In other words the sensory life of an urban inhabitant can develop a new attention to his own perceptual processes and to the production of sense and its related interpretations. This would lead to an emotional form of urban welcoming and of alternative knowledge, through managing symbolic design and planning. This takes advantage of the synergy that architecture can create between media production and wider functional understanding brought forth by the design of immersive sensory spaces.
It’s in this practical domain that city noise can receive a sound-music compositional answer, a systematic answer which triggers a process of acoustic re-design and sound-expressive restructuring of noisy sources and their spatial domains.
Attention against noise. Careful and intimate listening against the masses of media and mechanical noise. Media detail, understanding, detachment and critical osmosis versus refusal and escape, fear, obliteration, closure.
The possibility to use sound and other symbolic contents to re-orientate and mask the violent legacy of urban noise is the most powerful tool to exemplify the adaptation process and the confluence of sophisticated aesthetic, expressive elements and the daily experience. The category of intentional actions is first subjected to a sensory crisis, then to a social and actively aesthetic process.

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Sound Architecture Installations and Music Collaborations, among others:

Prato (IT), Museo del Tessuto (Textile Museum); Berlin (DE), 48h Neukoelln; Milano (IT), Mondadori/Electa; Torino (IT), FIAT-Motor Village Mirafiori; Berlin (DE), Engelbrot Theatre; Berlin (DE), Alberto Ukebana; Torino (IT), Club to Club; Krakow (PL), Shindler’s Factory; ROMA (IT), Andersen Museum; WROCLAW (PL), Villa Verona Park; MADRID (ES), Noche en blanco 2007; MILANO (IT), Euroluce 2007; FIRENZE (IT), P.za Demidoff; PARIS (FR), Nuite Blanche 2006; KRAKOW (PL), Alchemia; VENEZIA (IT), 10th Architecture Biennale; BOLOGNA (IT), Museum of modern art Bologna/Bottega Bologna; GENOVA (IT), Euroflora 2006; EINDHOVEN (HOL), TU-GASLAB; CHAUMONT SUR LOIRE, (FR) Landscape design festival 2006; London (GB), Hamton Court Palace Flower Show 2005;  Birmingham, (GB), BBC world garrdener’s live show 2004; FIRENZE (IT), Forte Belvedere/Mandarina Duck; Marseilles (FR), Theatre des Bernardines; BERLIN (DE), Podewils’schen Palais; COLOGNE (DE), Plan festival Cologne; BANGALORE (INDIA), Facets; BANGALORE (INDIA), Attakkalari Festival 2004; LUZERN, (CH). National Theatre, SFR; BBC (GB), Discovery Channel (Canada); Rai 2; Radio Rai; Rai Sat; RTSI (CH); Napoli, (IT), Città della Scienza; BIEL (CH), Progetto Klangturm- the Sound Tower-, Expo ’02; SIENA (IT) Centro Arte Contemporanea Papesse; LINZ (A), Ars Electronica 2002, RadioTopia project; MOERS (DE), Moers Festival 2001; PRATO (IT), Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci; MILANO (IT), Teatro C.R.T.; PRATO (IT), Teatro Metastasio; CESENA (IT), T. Bonci; Paris (FR) E.R.T. Paris, T. de la Bastille; SALZBURG (A), Teatro “REPUBLIC”; COLOGNE (DE), Filmhose; LUGANO (CH), “Teatro La foce”; LOS ANGELES (US) Italian Institute of Culture, UCLA; SITGES (ES), Festival de Sitges; BARCELONA (ES), Festival “El Grec”; SIENA (IT), Festival di Radicondoli; FIRENZE (IT), Fabbrica Europa; FIRENZE (IT), Musicus Concentus; AREZZO (IT), Festival “Il teatro e il sacro; FOLIGNO, (IT), Festival Segni Barocchi;
Lucio Capece; Marco Canevacci/Plastique Fantastique, Sarah Neville, Alessandro Mariantoni, Massimo Mazza, Claudio Nardi, Leonardo Proli, Roberto Baciocchi, Achille Bonito Oliva, Sergio Risaliti, Anna Rita Emili, Emanuele Piccardo, Marco Brizzi (SESV), Sosta Palmizi Dance Company, Franco Di Francescantonio, Massimo Luconi, Machine de Theatre/Piccolo Teatro di Milano, AIEP-Ariella Vidach and Claudio Prati, Andres Bosshard, Ikue Mori, Jamie Saft, Elliott Sharp, Zeena Parkins, Frank Shulte, Enrico Rava, Ares Tavolazzi, Bruno de’ Franceschi, Stefano Bollani, Stefano Battaglia, Werner Puntigam, Matthew Ostrowski, Steve Piccolo, Hector Zazou, David Shea, Fred Frith, Andrea Chimenti, Marco Parente, Pamela Z, Isabella Bordoni, Lukas Ligeti, Alex Balanescu, Mattia Di Rosa, Dino Bramanti.
info@lorenzobrusci.com