Listening to a Painting and Communing with Bees; Heavy Metal and the Oratorio for a Million Souls

This paper explores different approaches to the sonification and visualisation of two environmental projects undertaken by Nigel Helyer in conjunction with John Drummond. The interactive installation Heavy Metal is focussed upon the real-time analysis and sonification of the chemical elements in a painting via a camera vision system, whilst the Oratorio for a Million Souls project concerns the behaviour and acoustic properties of live bee colonies manifest in the creation of real-time multi-channel sound compositions and associated sound architectures. Whilst these two projects differ in terms of methodology, aesthetics and technical approach they both share a direct concern with a deep analysis of the underlying environmental structures and perceptual frameworks that emerge in direct embodied encounters — on one hand the discovery of what lies behind the surface of a painted image in terms of chemical and colour structures — and in the case of Oratorio, a compelling immersion into the acoustic environment of Bees.