Ezra Johnston · Lia Aguilar · Nia Wang
Personify
Personify is a twelve‑minute, 16‑channel audiovisual work for eight ceiling speakers and eight at ear level. Each listener enrols on a phone at the door with a face scan and a voice recording. From that the piece builds a persona, a body wearing their face that sings a written part in their resynthesised voice. It ends by deleting these captures permanently.
01 · rationale
Design rationale
02 · how it works
How it works
03 · spatialisation
Spatialisation
Spatial sound is the core of Personify. Sixteen speakers in the RMIT Black Box, in four rows of two either side of an open floor: eight overhead for the score, and directly below each one a speaker at ear height for one persona's voice.
The intention
We designed the spatialisation to tell the same story as the picture. The piece opens like a friendly, cheerful product, so the score starts completely flat: one signal on all eight overhead speakers, clear and easy, with nothing moving. When the music starts to glitch, it starts to move, and the room begins to feel unsettling. The drums travel around the room, each note of the melody lands on a different speaker, the bossa guitar plays from the front while its detuned double plays from the back, and the strings and arpeggio drift across the space. Outside, the music laps the room in a fixed, predictable loop, and in the techno it scatters at random, so the room comes apart along with the personas.
The voices do the opposite. Each persona stays on its own speaker at ear height for the whole piece, one voice per speaker like The Forty Part Motet, so however unstable the room gets, every person's voice comes from one fixed place, among the audience rather than above them. All three of us decided how each track should move, and Lia built it in Ableton.
04 · how it was made