Partnerships - Nigel Helyer

I am basically working in sound and environmental sound sculpture. A few years ago I started talking with a company in Sydney called Lake Technology, Lake DSP these days. They specialise in digital audio processing, mainly in three dimensional sound and dynamic spacial audio which I was quite interested in. I approached them on a fairly casual basis to access their equipment with a view to making museum projects. As that informal relationship developed they had a fairly gifted young marketing manager who is an engineer called Len Layton. We started talking about some 'what-if' scenarios. I think we took it a little too seriously and wrote a successful proposal to the New Media Board of the Australia Council for some funding for a one year project which turned into a two and a half year project.

This slide shows a project that is a virtual reality of augmented audio reality projects. It started off as a kind of wacky left of field 'the Artist comes to the company' type of situation. The company is probably about forty people, fairly focussed. At that time it wasn't listed on the Stock Exchange, it was privately financed. To my surprise the company got really excited by my ideas and employed a full time Senior Design Engineer - they charge these guys out at eight thousand dollars a week. He worked with me for nearly two years on it. So the resources they put into it were quite substantial - they funded the project including me for a further eighteen months.

The other significant collaboration was our relationship with the SNAP Lab (Satellite Navigation and Positioning Lab) of the University of New South Wales. While this was to have been shown at the Adelaide Festival but sadly didn't happen, a direct result of this project is that my relationship with the guys out at UNSW under SNAP Lab and the Human Interface Lab are really very strong and we are continuing to work on projects. These slides are some of the addition projects I was able to realise. One main research project that they were happy to support was in the area of augmented audio reality. The main feature of the Sonic Landscapes R&D Project was the concept of a juxtaposition of a virtual but extremely convincing 3D emersive soundscape which is very accurately positioned across real geography with cardiographic software.

And conceptually the effect is similar to Murray Schafers Concept of Schizophrenia or Split Sound which by the simple act of recording, sound is split from it's original physical context and projected into another context. The telephone is a great example of that. And it's something that we are almost blind or deaf to because of our familiarity to it.

In a virtual audio reality system we aren't dealing with this day to day, the habitual experience of disembodied voices which we experience in say popular music, reproduced and re-contextualised. The virtual audio reality type systems we're engaging in is with a live sonic organism which is incredibly responsive to our presence, to our orientation and to the traces of our movements through space.

This slide shows the prototype of the mannequin and you'll find that in the archive section of the ConVerge exhibition. On its head is a box that has a digital compass in it with a one degree accuracy of head rotation. We were using a patented LAKE algorithm (which they sold to Dolby, the first time Dolby's ever licensed anything from a third party company) which gives you a virtual speaker array in head phones. The sound doesn't come from here or here, it comes from way up there - a very powerful sense of being in an audio spatial special environment.

It gives an extraordinarily accurate, positional accuracy of about two centimetres anywhere on the surface of the Earth, which is actually quite spooky when you realise that a satellite which is so many hundred kilometres up in the air can nail it down to two centimetres.

I used St Stephens Churchyard in Newtown, it's one of the second oldest burial grounds in Sydney, mainly because it provided a safe pedestrian zone but one that is full of strong visual, sculptural and historical features. Not to mention a large amount of text, which is very useful when you are working with voice.

The potential downside for me was that I was keen to drive this to being a full cultural expression of the technology but what I ended up with was a series of demonstrations shown mainly to perspective co-developers and research partners.

hrough that process we toned down the software and content to the point where you could walk past a grave and it would announce the text on the grave - very spooky. Now when I walk past the graveyard I am convinced that this is a kind of animated graveyard.

Interestingly my role at LAKE developed in other significant directions. The first was a major shift in the relationship of the company to the project and the project's research methodology. It went from being this wacky Artist thing to being one of the six core businesses of the company. And it was held up as a kind of new research paradigm for R&D. I feel strongly that fairly early on they realised that as an artist, I was able to move quite easily between cultural, industrial and educational environments. In fact they asked me to be their research liaison person and was tasked to develop these additional relationships with other markets.

They were actually very generous in funding me to go overseas to meet Labs and talk to people. I suppose in the hope that I was going to sell heaps of their very expensive gear, which I never managed to. I only ever gave it away to people.

A parallel development was my role as a creative person who was able to visualise or auralise and they realised that it was a powerful way of projecting this type of technology into real world applications and once such creative activity has quite pragmatic intentions, it rapidly enters this Sci Fi realm.

This kind of Sci Fi writing that I was doing for the company was designed to galvanise the programmers and engineers and was eventually embedded in patented applications. We'd have a think tank on a project and then I'd be asked to go away and write a treatment or a scenario. Because I've worked quite a lot in ABC Radio in places like the Listening Room, and the standard process there is that you have the conversation and say we're interested in the concept - come back with a treatment. So I would be on these think tanks, write a scenario, come back to the Engineers and say 'Here you go guys. This is what it's about.' And they'd go, 'Yeh, we can build that.' So what I'm gong to do is just read a little extract of one of these things that actually ended up in a patent. It's for a virtual audio personal assistant. A really kind of intelligent brooch that talks to you and organises your entire life.

Noyka Town?Well its story time again and we're off to Finland, I haven't been in the city for a long time. It's evening and I have few hours to kill before an appointment. It was long flight but after a couple of hours sleep and a shower I am ready to rejoin the Human Race, to log in again. After dressing I carefully insert the studs of my LAKER Vapper, virtually you personal assistant through my earlobes and gently insert them to ? Conduits into my ear canals. A clear but quiet voice responds to the almost inaudible double click of my tongue. 'Oh. Hello Nigel. We've arrived in Helsinki and it's 2123. I presume you've slept well. I've double checked your room bookings and all your appointments have confirmed. What are your requests for this evening?'.

"Well this is Helsinki. Why don't you find me a good bar with Russian food and then arrange for Tapio to meet me at the Book Store at 2300. Just guide me when I leave the building."

'Do you want a cab?'

"No thanks and just be pretty quiet this evening OK. Only chat if it's important. And would you turn off all that local tourist background, it drives me nuts."

I leave the Hotel and address my astrocare and hat. Ouch it's cold here. The Vapper assumes the laid back Robert persona. His voice every time I write beckons me, 'Lets go this way. Look ahead and you will see a large theatre building. Take the first left and walk for about 150 meters.' Standing at the curb I stare at the great bulk of the National Theatre. I blink as a snowflake gently brushes my face and immediately the theatre begins to announce it's program with some surround sound music with extracts thrown in to entice me.

"Robert, would you turn that thing off. Look I know I haven't been here for a long time but I want a quiet evening. Go easy on the hot spots OK." Maybe increase the threshold of my vapper is to double blink and to triple tongue click for a while. I walk through the light snow flurries in silence. Robert has suppressed all the usual weather data, stock exchange voice mail etc, and he's doing a good job of filtering off the commercial and historical information that is sure to be in every structure and surface that this city's capable of broadcasting.

And so it continues. It is actually quite long and what I would do in these types of scenarios is fictionally imbed every architectural or every detail of the kind of computer architecture that we wanted to code. So for all the instances or operations there would be some kind of scenario where you'd have to double click and put a signature on. The waitress brings you a drink and your credit card does this and that kind of stuff, it parks your car for you, whatever. As I say, I was intending to do a very miniaturised Sonic Landscapes mounted eye pack for the Festival. I'd got a site around the Torrens River. I'd spent two and a half months writing a MOU with UNSW which were going to do all the coding. LAKE liked the idea so much that they sold it to the Japanese. I'm a shareholder so I don't mind that.

But one of the things I would like us to discuss is this notion of some of the differences in the Culture of Culture and the Culture of Commerce and the different objectives that they both may have. It's interesting to talk about the Stock Exchange and the rapid cultural change inside high tech organisations because a company listed on the Stock Exchange can change radically from a Blue Sky research operation to a very much commercial focus. IS THIS THE COMPANY HE'S TALKING ABOUT?

This company went through three Managing Directors in two and a half years. Such massive culture changes probably concerns me most and the prospect for partnerships in Australia. I think that the commitment from industry partners and technology partners has to not only be to the Artist but also to Art and Culture in general and not simply to use artistic projects as a kind of window dressing, PR, branding and a good root into an economic benefit. We'd be stupid to discount the economic benefit because it has to be there, but I think there has to be a really strong commitment to doing that. It's a double pathway rather than flipping into a single pathway. And of course the bottom line is the contractual issues surrounding intellectual property and co-defining access and rights to creative work within that commercial and industrial situation.

© Nigel Helyer 2002