Museum reading room resonates to spatial reindeer sounds

Last month, London’s Wellcome Collection hosted the Land Body Ecologies Festival – a four-day event incorporating art installations, workshops, talks, films and performances to explore the connections between mental health and the environment.

One of the highlights of the festival was Boalno, which utilised immersive audio as a sensory vehicle to transport museum guests to an Arctic landscape.

The exhibit was created by UK-based multi-disciplinary arts studio Invisible Flock, which also co-produced the festival.

Technical director Ben Eaton and creative director Victoria Pratt travelled to the Boalnotjåhkkå mountain, where the Sámi people of Sweden corral 3,000 reindeer each year. They captured the sound of the reindeer using a combination of ambisonic and parabolic microphones, recording into a Sound Devices MixPre 6.

The audio files were then spatially manipulated in L-Acoustics’ L-ISA Studio software suite.

Boalno was presented in the Wellcome Collection’s Reading Room, featuring 16 L-Acoustics X8 coaxial speakers configured in a 360° array on a horizontal plane. Its run time was condensed to 20 minutes to provide the audience with a sonic rendering of the reindeer herding.

Photo: Invisible Flock

UK-based DeltaLive provided a range of equipment and sound installation services for Boalno. Account director Stephen Hughes says: “We had a Mac Mini running Reaper and an RME MADIface AVB card, going into an L-ISA Processor. We needed only 16 outputs for the session, so the L-Acoustics LA7.16i amplified controller was perfect.”

Eaton says he appreciates the broad feature set in L-ISA Studio, including the updated FX Engine and low-frequency oscillator (LFO) control capabilities.

On Boalno, he used little reverb, since the recording space was vast. “The airiness of the ambisonics helped give you a sense of space,” says Eaton. He used L-ISA 3.0’s LFO controls to animate the signal of the parabolic microphone within the soundscape.

“In Boalno we used a lot of LFOs because we had a lot of rotating objects,” says Eaton. “We used LFOs at different speeds, overlapping them and phasing them in and out. That’s how we could generate this trance-like, strange sound that kept moving. Ultimately, the motion became a defining feature of this project.”

L-ISA Studio helped Eaton achieve workflow efficiencies. “I enjoy all of the newly added effects in L-ISA 3.0,” he says. “These are a real time saver, which I valued on this project.”