In my daily life, the public place I come into contact with the most is the subway station, and my contact with the subway station is very regular. However, when I think back to the subway station, a place I should be very familiar with from time to time, all I can think of is the same as the residents of Amsterdam, “a noisy place”, completely forgetting any positive words, this impression makes me very frightened, the subway station’s sound has too strong an impact on the space. So I wanted to use Glasgow’s Buchanan Street subway station as an entry point for the project, exploring its connection to the people of Glasgow in the space by listening to and processing sound.

I went to the field to get a feel for the sounds and the feelings that form inside the subway station. I recorded the sites where the main sounds occurred, and in doing so I realized that the sounds emanating from the sites were very diverse, but likewise the singularity of the form in which the sounds were played. Based on the timing of the sounds, I created a unique subway music for Buchanan Station by combining it with the structure of an existing piano piece called Damascus (which also has a single form of playback, but a beautiful melody).

When I finished the preliminary research mentioned above, I began to think about the relationship between sound design itself and human beings and architecture. In Bernhard Leitner’s work, his subject is not the space itself, but the human being that exists inside the space. In his project Sound Chair, one can feel a sound travelling back and forth inside the body, and the auditory experience affects the other senses of the person experiencing it. This allows the sound chair to form a private space for the experience even when placed in a public space, as the space seems to originate from a movement that travels through the body of the experience, and as the sound allows the experience to focus on the inner space of the body itself, it naturally separates from the surrounding space. A more visual example is the Sound Umbrella, in which Bernhard Leitner inserts a special sound into an umbrella that causes the skin to tingle, and people standing under the umbrella feel sheltered and isolated from their surroundings. This way of creating an intimate space is new to me.

What exactly is space?  When sound as an element intervenes in the design, the space can be formed by an umbrella or a chair, and the space becomes a sensory place where reality meets artistic creation. Thinking back to my point of interest, “to experience architectural sound in a more interesting way”, I decided not to design ordinary interior spaces, but to combine them with some kind of small volume sound medium to create a unique private experience.

What small-bodied sound medium is used to create a private experience? I was inspired by Fredrik Tjærandsen’s fashion design Moment Of Clarity. In his projects, bubbles made of rubber engulf the wearer, pushing the boundaries of clothing, sculpture and space. In an interview, he said that the balloon provides the wearer with a separate space and that when the balloon is filled with air it symbolizes a blurred memory, and the process of contraction represents a withdrawal from the memory and a return to reality. This transfer of ideas reminds me of the concept of liminal space, where the garment creates a transition zone, a space for the wearer to fantasize.

This form of expression fits in with my theme of “impression transformation”. Therefore, I have chosen the form of output to be clothing as well. I placed the installation in a subway station, where people keep the impression of “noise”. When experiencing the installation, people feel the music formed by the beautiful subway sounds, and in this private space, the visual and auditory senses form a strong contrast, which makes people rethink about the sounds of the subway station, and achieves a change of impression. In this project, the wearable serves as a medium of transition between the viewer and the subway station, a buffer zone between the already existing internal impression and the external reality.

In conjunction with these reflections, my goal was to use wearable space as a medium to experience the architectural music of the Buchanan Street subway station.

After researching numerous wearable devices, I have come to a more comprehensive understanding and consideration of the space formed by the combination of wearable devices and music, where sound is no longer a small unit attached to the physical space below. When sound is expressed through the medium of the wearable and the participation of the participant, a spatial experience is formed for the participant himself. This experience is a combination of the visual structure, the movement of consciousness and the invisible auditory senses of the participant. Therefore, I decided to divide the production of wearable space in this project into three aspects: material sound, audience dynamics and audience hearing.

material sound

I organized the sounds recorded in the Buchanan Street subway station and used the software Adobe Audition to display the sonic patterns of each basic sound source, combining the structural features of the different areas of the subway station and extracting the lines to form a number of unique basic patterns. In the early stages of the project development, I used the basic shape in each part to make cardboard models and combine them randomly on the mannequin in order to open up my mind as
much as possible and get a lot of different shapes.

audience dynamic

In the previous case, the form and movement of the audience wearing these devices affect the sound effects they perceive. So if I want the devices to achieve the specified sound effect (subway station music I had made), I necessarily have to study their vocalization system. After obtaining the basic forms, I simulated the dynamics of these form wearers on myself, observing and circling the nodes that collide due to changes in posture. These nodes are the source of the music made by experiencing the device.

As a part of the project, the spectator’s movements generate material collisions that have a significant impact on the soundscape. I felt that it was not enough to study the sequence of wearing the devices and the points of collision as the case studies above did, which weakened the connection between the project and the subway station site. So I researched the postures of the people in the subway stations, and I hope to explore the collision points caused by these postures and the order of wearing these devices in the subsequent development, so as to combine the materials to form the ideal architectural music.

audience hearing

Sounds all attenuate over distance. In sound-driven spaces, such as concert halls, where the science of acoustics is integrated with architecture and the art of music, from an acoustic design point of view, the space needs to be carefully controlled by acousticians to tune in to the reflection, diffusion or absorption of sound. So I used Touch Designer acoustic software, combined with the architectural music (subway station music) I had already produced, to create a state drawing of the sound diffusion at each moment in time.

The project itself is about reconstructing people’s impressions of architectural sound through speculative thinking. As urban sound is everywhere and unavoidable, I would like to contribute to the discussion of sound improvement and the possibility
of co-defining a “more favourable future”. Because of the specificity of the installation material, it is difficult to create a space made of architectural material that people can wear. I tend to use electronic media to present my work. For this project, I would like to combine motion capture software in the subsequent development, and through virtual means (like the case study above), I would aim to guide people to move in a predetermined way, to form a collision, and to experience architectural music.

As for the conceptual development itself, I would like to set the venue in public places other than underground stations in the future, to create a variety of architectural music in public places, and I hope that through the same method, I can really guide people to face the sounds in their lives in architecture, to experience, and to think about the music in the city of din.