Interfacing With Atmospheric Attunement to Foster Environmental Awareness

This article presents a review of a case of environmental sound with embodied and pervasive media in an interactive installation called Augury - Atmospheric Attunement. It ponders on embodied technologies to potentially augment our sensorium across scales of perception and awareness. The project combines ancestral and modern ways of sensing and perceiving our atmosphere, wherein technologies create an orientation towards attuning perception through experiments with ubiquitous media and environmental computing. Turned into datasets for immersing the audience into the complexities of multiscalar weather sensing stations.
Technologies for sensing and measuring the atmosphere as we know it today arose from ancient methods that transfigured into modern meteorological developments. Arguably, ancient meteorology moved from mythological to empirical-scientific, in order to explain and predict weather events (Taub, 2003). This article considers that hypothetical transition as potentially recursive, using contemporary weather sensing technologies to understand and predict intuitively atmospheric processes.
The installation employs a multichannel sound instrument created to generate soundscapes from atmospheric processes. This instrument takes inspiration from ancient cultures to create sensing media to extend the perception of the performer, who also then becomes a listener of atmospheric processes. The interface channels dynamics found in the atmosphere: wind’s force and direction, air quality, atmospheric pressure, and electromagnetism. These sources are translated into sound by mapping sensor data into a multichannel sonification composition. The paper outlines the artistic context and expands on its interaction overview.
This exploration is based on recent years of research around environmental sound, centered on atmospheric processes, such as the wind and the electromagnetic spectrum. This tendency started by exploring generative and indeterministic methods in music and sound-making.
This sonic exploration set off at creating soundscapes related to elusive and often complex atmospheric phenomena, such as the air and wind. These media experiment series combined sound and the environment to ponder their ecologies, their affinity across technology, and their augmented perception of surrounding processes driven by the invisible forces of the atmosphere. Some of the activities concerning my artistic research focused on composing multichannel spatialization of sound, the notion of weather forecasting, and the meaning of performing with sound from a south-hemisphere perspective