Vietnamese artist Phạm Minh Hiếu recently specified a d&b Soundscape system to serve as a vessel for his artistic expression on his latest project The Contemporary. Headliner spoke to him about the installation and the role that Soundscape played in bringing it to life.
Through a collaboration representing the awakening of Vietnamese contemporary art culture, Phạm was commissioned to create an installation for the unveiling of a new art space based in Hanoi called The Outpost. The installation, which runs from November 29 2022 to Feb 28 2023, honours the past of Vietnam, recognises the present, and looks to the future by bringing together six Vietnamese contemporary artists of all ages and demographics.
Phạm Minh Hiếu’s work titled The Contemporary is described by the artist as a “total installation” that takes audiences on a journey through the history of artistic expression in his home country, with the audience guided by footsteps of ‘wanderers’, helping them picture the Vietnamese contemporary art landscape. The installation uses d&b Soundscape to bring the sound of the invisible wanderers alive as they roam the exhibit, evoking their presence and superimposing their realms onto the physical site of the exhibition.
“With traditional sound systems using level panning it would have been impossible to achieve spatialisation so quickly,” said Ningru (Ning) Guo, sound designer for the production. “d&b Soundscape is a great system for this purpose since it supports object-based audio and is easy to use for scenarios where audio needs to be moved around the space seamlessly. In The Contemporary, the sound system is placed in different rooms and we have to send contents across these rooms to trigger much bigger sound events to achieve a tsunami of sound. Soundscape’s visualisation of sound makes it much easier for everyone involved in this project to understand how sound travels from one room to another room and how we can design the sound to interact with the museum visitors.”
“I created this work from the foundation of Whitehead’s process philosophy, which argues that reality is a series of perishing events,” Pham told Headliner. “Thus, I designed The Contemporary to be a contingent reality consisting of such a series of events that are either continuous or superimposing on one another. At the exhibition space, The Outpost, these events can take place indeterminately in one or multiple galleries at a time.
“I chose to work with d&b Soundscape because its object-based mixing allows me to control sound sources as individual objects and create events by programming the movement of these sound objects.
“Since the wanderers of The Contemporary move from one gallery to another, it’s crucial for the audience to perceive these movements. Soundscape’s source localisation capacity can afford this. As the sound object moves from afar to up close or as the volume of each sound object alters, the calculated delay evokes clear presence of invisible wanderers.”
By using En-Scene, a sound object positioning tool, Phạm could work with the individual placement and movement of up to 64 sound objects. As audiences make their way through the non-linear exhibit, these ethereal presences will be heard not seen, as Soundscape guides visitors through the works of other artists, allowing them to attain multiple perspectives of the exhibition and come up with their own definition of ‘Vietnamese contemporary art’.
To add to the “total installation” concept, there are scenarios in which Guo and Phạm planted triggers around the gallery to increase interactivity and engagement. These triggers were able to respond to the various distances and sounds from the visitors with various predetermined sounds designed using Soundscape to transform the gallery experience into a fully immersive one. In this case, the actions of the visitors would also result in a consequence which is translated aurally.
Complementing Soundscape, the team also utilised d&b’s xS-Series. With their unobtrusive cabinet design the xS loudspeakers are suited for a contemporary art space like The Outpost. For added flexibility, rotatable horns enable the loudspeakers to be deployed in either orientation, while the cardioid subwoofer technology delivers low frequencies exactly where needed and not behind the system. This setup helps the system to hide at the peripheral of the visitors’ attention when they are musing on other artworks and can easily return to their focus once the sound plays.
This is the first time d&b has worked on an art installation in Vietnam, with the exhibition pushing the boundaries of Soundscape, something that the d&b team was very willing and excited to take on.
“d&b had faith in me as a young creator, and supported my work,” said Phạm. “I highly appreciate the collaborative spirit demonstrated throughout this project. They were supportive from the very beginning. From the first online consultation to many in-person meetings and experimenting in their workshop, they were willing to share extensive and in-depth information about the system. On top of that, d&b had also connected us with other creators in their network which played a crucial part in the success of The Contemporary, a highly collaborative project.”