Simulacrum

by Paulo Assis Barbosa
Four stereo tape machines fed by a 440Hz sine wave, and taken to their limits, in a performance using tape delay and feedback techniques to create an universe of tape saturation, noise and sound artifacts. The eight audio channels, disposed around the listener initial position, plays with his sound source perception, and his movement in the space creates phase cancelling and acoustic beats, changing his auditory perception. But all this experiment is done with tape emulation software, not real analog tape machines. And all those channels are not interacting inside a real acoustic space, but in the sound campus metaverse, exploring its capacities of rendering binaural sound events. It has all been a simulacrum, with virtual analog sounds, tape distortion, noise, audio channels and space. Between the performer gestures and the listener, all has been mediated by an emulated reality.
Tags: