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D'impulso

D'impulso

Historical materials for the work: text, photographs, audio and video when available.

Roberto Pugliese&Agostino di Scipio

D’impulso mp3 players, loudspeakers, computers, sound cards, cables, microphones).

2007

This work revolves around the relationship between sound, space and commercial systems of sound reproduction. In a hall with white walls and ceilings, aseptic, rather reflective, a number of mp3 players are connected to a series of speakers (speakers of different size, type and power), facing the walls of the hall at various points of the room. The sound reproduced by the MP3 players is entirely synthetic and of an impulsive nature, generated in part by pseudo-random functions and partly by deterministic methods. Since the speakers are facing the wall, the sound emitted is reflected and spreads around the hall in a non-directional fashion. A computer dynamically adjusts the plot of the pulse in relation to the resonances that occur around the hall. A self-regulating system is created which manifests itself as an acoustically changing environment, full of sonic micro-events (a sort of artificial rain). As a whole, the result is acoustically conditioned (1) from mp3 encoding (even at low quality, with typical audible artefacts), (2) the quality of the speakers (which, particularly in the case of synthetic pulses, manifest all their limitations in the quality of sound reproduced) (3) by the acoustics characteristics of the hall (geometry, construction materials, etc..), and (4) from the background noise that generates around the hall, hence the number of visitors and their ever-changing presence that generates sound and noise . All the elements involved interact with one another, in sound, mediated by the space that welcomes the installation.