The FoldA voice becomes a place.
I’m interested in haunting spaces, and in finding what already haunts them. I want to coax a presence into perceptibility, or excavate the traces through which it might become available again. The Fold is my attempt to make a haunting available to explore.
Begin by listeningOne utterance. Thirty-two transformations.
1 / Listen
The room becomes audible.
I begin with Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting in a Room. He records a spoken passage, plays it into a room, and records it again. Each new recording becomes the next source. The room reinforces some frequencies more than others. With repetition, the words give way to sustained tones. I want to make that passage available to explore.
I think of these recordings as sonic ghosts. A voice continues to act on my listening as its familiar form comes apart. Something of its rhythm and contour persists. The room becomes audible through what it has done to that voice.
Lucier composed the work in 1969. I’m working with his 1980 recording, which I’ve divided here into 32 generations. I invite you to begin with the voice, move toward the ringing, then go back. Listen for what persists as well as what disappears. Source and recording notes
The question I want to hold open: when do I begin listening to the sound of a sentence instead of its words?
I’ve kept the recorded passages here so you can compare them directly. Select one, then press Play. This control moves through Lucier’s recording; it doesn’t generate a new room.
2 / Notice
What is allowed to remain?
The haunting, for me, is in that persistence. Each recording carries the history of the voice’s repeated encounters with the room. I hear a presence being transformed through what the space reinforces and what it allows to diminish. This is what keeps bringing me back to Lucier.
I can measure how the spectrum changes. What I call a sonic ghost emerges in my encounter with that change: what I recognize, what I strain to hear, what continues to hold my attention as the words become harder to distinguish. I’m asking you to listen for yourself.
I’ve given the measurements a visual form. I make broad spectra rounder and concentrated spectra flatter and folded. I let colour follow the spectral centre of gravity. These are translations I’ve designed: a way to see differences between recordings as I move among them. They aren’t pictures of sound waves or reconstructions of Lucier’s room.
In the selected recording
96frequency bins hold half the measured energy.
Recording 1. I use the same frequency band and resolution for every recording. A larger count means its energy is spread more broadly.
I’ve put recordings 18–20 beside each other here because the measured breadth opens again. I want that reversal to remain visible and audible, rather than make every step look like an inevitable narrowing.
3 / Rearrange
Give time a floor.
I want to give these sonic ghosts places I can approach and leave. On the recording, one moment follows another. Here I can put a late transformation beside an early one, linger between them, and return to a voice from another direction. Where I stand becomes part of what I hear.
I’ve been building versions and expansions of this idea since 2020. I began while learning ARKit in Unity, then continued when I entered the Bose AR developers program. The tools changed as I kept working through the idea: how to give a sonic presence a place, and how to encounter it through movement and attention.
One version took the form of a twelve-position listening clock. In 2021, I made a Three.js study with sonic objects I could walk among. I’ve carried those experiments, and the years of consideration and practice around them, into this version. Here I give thirty-two transformations places of their own, and invite you to change the relationships between them.
Versions of the haunting
I’ve kept these recordings of the earlier versions. I place a virtual record player in a physical room through the phone, arrange sound sources around a listener, and move among spheres in a browser. I can return to these experiments here, alongside what I’m making now.
I’ve listed the videos in the order I uploaded them. These dates mark when I shared the recordings.
I’ve given you two orders to try below. I keep the numbers attached so each recording carries its place in time, even when I arrange it by another rule. What begins to seem related? What has my arrangement made harder to notice?
I use this table to compare the recordings in different orders. Choose a numbered form to hear it. In the playground, I give you the floor itself to rearrange.
4 / Play
Now make your own arrangement.
I’ve given thirty-two sonic ghosts a first arrangement. I want to approach them, linger among them, leave and return. I want to hear what proximity brings forward, and what becomes perceptible when I give it my attention. Now I’m inviting you to explore: enter a form and hear its sound come forward, move the numbered objects on the arranging table, then walk through what you have made.
I’ll also invite you to read the text aloud. I pass your voice through a model I built from the recording; I’m not putting it through Lucier’s actual room. You can decline. I’ve left the listening and arranging open either way.
I’ve placed the sounds so you can hear where they are through headphones. I’ve included keyboard and on-screen controls, and a way to make a link that carries your arrangement to another listener.