One usage of this technique was the VR experience that accompanied the excellent film "Notes on Blindness" 2016 by Peter Middleton and James Spinney . The film is based on academic John Hull’s diary about learning to accept blindness during the early 1980s, Notes on Blindness uses original audio recordings to attempt to visualise the sensation of losing sight. Hull, who kept a log of his emotional journey as his sight failed, eventually accepted his condition, describing himself as a “whole-body seer”. The film won at Sheffield Docfest in 1996.
The film is uses amazingly visuals and has incredible sound design to try and communicate Hull's amazing verbalizations of going blind. Actors play out scenes lip-synching to his words be they thoughtful descriptions of his failing eye-sight. Also audioscapes of when he used to leave microphones and tape recorders around his house in different rooms and environments as he tried to make sense of his impending sightless world aurally. The film actually comes with different soundtracks for the sighted and also the blind through different audio description options too.
To accompany the screening the directors also created a VR experience "Notes on Blindness: Into darkness" that you could use to try and get an impression of John Hull's re-interpretation of a world without sight. I experienced this as part of the Cambridge Film Festival where after the screening you could don a headset and headphones and get a feeling of John Hulls world. the experience as an audience was bewildering as you were in a very isolated experience and shut off from the outside world a very different environment from the busy cinema auditorium I had just emerged from. It helped in this sense to appreciate the isolation of an unfamiliar world. The experience then used Johns own audio as he tried to explain how he made sense of the world and the ever changing environments using just the audioscapes around him. Visually it built up almost echo sounder, audio inspired 3D fragments of light and shapes to create objects as the sound from them would have brought Johns senses to life to create his environment. The experience was pretty interactive and as the audience you followed the sound coming from all around to track down and also make sense of the environment you were in just as john would have done. Sound came from all around, the foreground, middle and background and sometimes moving between all three as it became yours and Johns focus.
Taking this idea forward into my own work I loved the idea of being immersed by sound and the sound design coming from all directions and alerting you to visuals and interest within the experience. The visuals represented in the experience would obviously not work for my Amen piece but the idea of background, middle-ground and fore-ground elements of visual and sound really fascinates me. also the VR ability to get the audience responding to the environment to build their own narrative. The notion of headphones and experiencing the piece as an individual and the way that a lot of music is consumed today through headphones greatly interested me. I need to look into the technology more and explore the potential and appropriateness for my work but feel it is an interesting avenue to pursue.
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