Still Waters Run Deep - Jiayou Wu, Polina Ami Kosele, Teodora Serbanescu
Presented by: Jiayou Wu, Polina Ami Kosele, Teodora Serbanescu
Biography Polina Ami Kosele
Biography Teodora Serbanescu
Still Waters Run Deep leverages the spiritual and scientific bond between emotions and alternative water therapies. Told as a sonic 360° visual-acoustic interactive story. Our practice offers an avant-garde insight into a self-discovery experience, presented within a three-section underworld 360° reactive environment. The three main spaces, which are all created as a collaborative effort, are: the lobby, which is the first room our users interact with when they enter the experience and two other secondary rooms.
The project merges abstract visual stimuli with various auditory techniques (e.g. ambisonics, frequency specific sound, foley sounds, binaural audio and binaural beats) and creates audio reactive visuals that transport the user into a contemplating state of consciousness.
Still Waters Run Deep is meant to destigmatize and re-think storytelling around emotions, mental health and neurodiversity. This is the motivation behind our choice to generate an individual, prejudice-free space which places a great value on the personal journey of each individual while preserving a sense of community.
The characteristics of each room are as follows: the lobby is a 5 - 8 minute ambisonic audio experience based on a loop-play of 60 bpm and 432 Hz. The first room presents a water-particle computerized work which is responsive to frequency specific binaural beats, based on a frequency of 30Hz with a steady beat and features a guiding meditative voice, recorded in the RCA Sound Lab with a binaural microphone. The second room features a water-foley field recording which emulates the sound of a slow-paced waterfall. All 3 rooms are built on a computerised approach to conventional therapy methods with the help of modern technology softwares such as Unreal Engine, Binaural beats and Sound Synthesizers.
This 360° experience is designed as an alternative creative asset, with professional therapy practices sitting right at the bottom of our research pyramid. Wanting to make sure our project has a strong backbone, both creatively and scientifically, we advised with both sound and art credited counselors, whose practice informed the main characteristics of the final storyline, such as niche audiences, sound tempo, pitch, frequency and vibration.
Collaborator Names: Jiayou Wu, Polina Ami Kosele, Teodora Serbanescu