Sound Installations @ SARC

In between concerts, talks and sound walks, take a moment to find these exciting works.

• Courtney Brown  –  Dinosaur Choir  (SARC Basement Broadcast Studio)
• Lisa Conway  –   Staircase  (SARC Stairwell)
• Ulster Touring Opera  –  AR Opera  (SARC Foyer)

Programme notes:

Courtney Brown  –  Dinosaur Choir  (SARC Basement Broadcast Studio)

Dinosaur Choir recreates the sounds of dinosaurs as singing dinosaur skull musical instruments. Visitors give voice to the dinosaur interactive installation by blowing into a microphone, exciting a vocal mechanism and resonating the sound through a 3D replica of the dinosaur’s nasal cavities and skull, fabricated via CT scans of the fossil. Courtney Brown presents their first instrument, an adult Corythosaurus a lambeosaurine hadrosaur with a large hollow crest that scientists hypothesized was used for sound resonation. Visitors will get to know the dinosaur through the controlled exhalation of their breath, how the compression of the lungs leads to a whisper or a roar. In a sense, they fleetingly experience being a dinosaur. With this intimate action with an extinct creature, we hope to stimulate excitement and educate the public about dinosaurs, paleontology, and raise awareness of global ecologies.

Lisa Conway   –   Staircase   (SARC Stairwell)

Staircase is a site-specific multi-channel sound installation by Lisa Conway.  Inspired by the work and research of Maryanne Amacher, and as part of Lisa’s own current practice-based research, this work is a sonic duet with the architectural staircase structure, exploring physicality, gestures, and intersecting aural sound spaces created through idiosyncratic speaker placement and psychoacoustic phenomena.

Ulster Touring Opera – AR Opera / Université de Montréal – OpéRA de Poche (SARC Foyer)

Grab an iPad and experience Ulster Touring Opera’s new ‘AR Opera’ app and Université de Montréal’s ‘OpéRA de Poche’ projects.  Featuring works of opera recorded specially in volumetric capture, these projects will allow you to shift and scale the singers around the SARC foyer.

Over the past five years, the opera industry has started to explore the possibilities of extended reality (XR) to renew and democratize the genre.

Directed by Dafydd Hall Williams, Ulster Touring Opera (Belfast) has since 2021 been collaborating with the Canada Research Chair in Opera Creation (Université de Montréal) to explore new approaches to opera and extended reality.  They have created operas in augmented reality, developed using volumetric capture and accessible on mobile devices. Using the emerging technologies of volumetric capture, spatial audio, and world space aware AR, their projects radically change the way that we explore narrative and storytelling in opera, bringing opera into the audience members’ domestic space.