Infinity Room Barry D. Truax

The visual complexity and sense of boundless space in an “Infinity Room” installation has made them very popular in art galleries, but what could we imagine would be the aural equivalent? This work creates a somewhat analogous experience in an immersive space where a large number of environmental sounds are refracted with each other and move around the listener until they trail off into the distance. Percussive, as well as musical, vocal and noisy sounds from various cultural sources, combine in seemingly endless variations as we move from mirrored room to room. Technically, the work is based on a set of 27 acoustically rich environmental samples, each of which is convolved with all others to create 351 stereo hybrids (where the L/R channels are A*B and B*A). The samples range from impulse responses in large spaces through percussive sounds, musical and vocal excerpts, bells, thunder and strange noises. Each of the 351 hybridized sounds is spatialized independently, often in trajectories around the listener in the multi-channel space. I doubt that any other soundscape-inspired work has embodied this much complexity.

Source: 2020

  • Year of composition: 2019
  • Genre: Soundscape
  • Format: Fixed media
  • Instrumentation: 8 or 16 digital soundtracks
  • Hardware used: Original recordings by the composer.
  • Software used: Sound processing realized with Soundhack convolution and Chris Rolfe’s MacPod software.
  • Duration of the submitted work: 10:00
  • Publisher: Cambridge Street Publishing
  • Premiere: September 14, 2019, Convergence Festival, De Montfort University, Leicester, UK

More works by Barry D. Truax