MPavilion is an annual, temporary pavilion that can be found in the Queen Victoria Gardens in Melbourne’s CBD. For the 2018 architect Carme Pinós has designed a pavilion that aspires to be ‘a place to experience with all the senses; to establish a sophisticated relationship with nature.’ Inspired by this, SensiLab collaborated with MPavilion for the 2018-19 season to produce an experience that allows people to navigate the acoustic space below MPavilion.
Four hydrophones were buried around the pavilion, each in a slightly environmentally distinct location than the other. These hydrophones detect pressure changes in the earth and feed this information to a central digital audio mixer. Following simple post-production of the audio signals, the sound from these hydrophones was live streamed into a simple 3D virtual environment, which approximates the geography and architecture of the Queen Victoria Gardens.