Utopia E4: Doorways

Just three more sections of our Utopia map remain unexplored before the project comes to a close this week – and here’s section E4.

Doorways – Paul Freeman, London, UK

“The piece focuses its attention on a doorway at the top of square E4. The door is positioned close to a river and the coastline, providing an initial indication of the environmental soundscape.

Based on descriptions of Utopian society the door can be considered unlocked and accessible and it is here that the imagined listener is positioned.

The acoustic reflections of small spaces, such as stone doorways, can produce peculiar aural effects, especially with a sound source as rich in frequencies as the filtered white noise of waves.

The piece expands on this idea, imagining a listener whose sonic experience and memory of the place is based on the acoustic abstraction of the doorway’s reflections, leaving a psychoacoustic impression of the location’s sound.

A field recording of distant waves is processed through a convolution reverb matching the imagined space and then filtered to growing degrees of intensity, eventually removing all trace of the original field recording and forming a pure sine wave, echoing the tensions between nature, order and purity present in Utopia.”