‘R-umore’ is an interactive installation that allows the public to enter into contact with the intimate experience of Margherita’s sonic world. By listening with headphones to the recordings she made and by reading and decoding her visual work, people are encouraged to reflect upon how sounds and noises affect them and their environment.
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The project ‘R-UMORE’ has been developed for my bachelor thesis at the Free University of Bolzano(Italy) during the summer semester of 2015. Its research meets the fields of experimental musical notation and network data art.
The project brings to light the relationship between my mood and the sounds that daily surround me, from music to traffic, wind, creakings, people’s noises…
The title ‘R-UMORE’ comes from the Italian words ‘rumore’ and ‘umore’, which literally mean ’noise’ and ‘mood’.
I have chosen to deal with this topic because of a strong personal interest in my aural perception of the world and the need to examine it also through the creation of new songs. I have always been curious about understanding how the mind can create new key sequences and improvisations. I think one possible answer lies in the interaction between our auditory everyday life and our mood.
For two months I have collected sounds, emotions, and environmental data (six times per day) with the support of the smartphone application ‘Reporter’, ‘Voice Memos’ recorder, and a little paper diary. Afterward, I decided to analyze and visually translate the material related to one month of work according to an alphabet of symbols specifically designed for this project. The graphical language that has been created takes inspiration from graphic musical notations as well as sound and color maps.
The final product consists of a diary, a memory, and an archive open to multiple interpretations. Each day of April is represented by a foldable paper, which contains the visualization of six recordings (1 min each).
Everything is vigorously made by hand because I wanted even the same symbols to always look different, to have some dissimilarities in intensity, thickness, and dimension of the line. Each symbol stands for a certain sound and since it is almost impossible to hear the same precise sound twice, also the symbols must always be a little different each time. Moreover, these symbols are created by pure spontaneous gestures of the hand on the paper while listening to the sounds.
R-umore 
