1. Introduction: intermediality, sound and perception
Electroacoustic audiovisual composition has frequently been concerned with how sound, image and technology are organised in relation to one another. Techniques such as synchronisation, juxtaposition or expressive alignment between media have allowed for compositional approaches shaped by cinematic or narrative logics. As Michel Chion argues, audiovisual relationships have predominantly been structured to reinforce semantic coherence, with sound functioning to support, confirm or direct the meaning of the image (Chion Reference Chion1994). Similarly, Nicholas Cook argues that audiovisual and multimedia practices have relied on alignment strategies through which one medium interprets or stabilises another, frequently drawing on established musical or narrative conventions (Cook Reference Cook1998). These accounts do not exhaust audiovisual practice, but they clarify a dominant stabilising tendency in which sound-image relations are often organised toward coherence, hierarchy and interpretive control.
Intermedial theory offers a wider framework and linguistic tools for reconsidering these relationships. As Irina Rajewsky describes, intermediality refers to ‘all those phenomena that take place between media’, focusing on relational processes rather than discrete media objects (Rajewsky Reference Rajewsky2005: 46). Rajewsky emphasises that intermedial combinations involve situations in which different media are ‘each present in their own materiality and contribute to the constitution and signification of the entire product’ (Rajewsky Reference Rajewsky2005: 52). This concern for how different media contribute to a greater whole implies that there is no one inherent media hierarchy, and that one medium is not structurally privileged over another. The focus on relationality becomes especially productive when media are considered in terms of the sensory and spatiotemporal modalities through which they are perceived and organised in experience (Elleström Reference Elleström and Elleström2021).
Elleström’s modality-based account of media supports an understanding of media not as fixed formal categories, but as constituted through material, spatiotemporal, sensorial and semiotic modalities that shape how media are perceived and made meaningful (Elleström Reference Elleström and Elleström2021). This is particularly important for electroacoustic audiovisual composition, where sound and image do not simply coexist as separate media layers, but operate through shared, competing or unstable perceptual relations. Chiaramonte’s account of intermedial interference develops this problem within electroacoustic audiovisual composition by examining how temporal, spectral, spatial and conceptual media features interact within an intermedial space. In this framework, sound-image relations may produce constructive or destructive interference, requiring composers to negotiate balance, synchrony and associative mapping as part of the compositional process (Chiaramonte Reference Chiaramonte2026).
From a sonic perspective, intermediality can help to examine what happens when sound and image are treated as mutually active components of a perceptual situation. This question of media relation also invites a parallel question concerning the senses. If intermediality challenges hierarchical relationships between media forms, then audiovisual practice must also ask how sensory hierarchies shape the media we perceive, and what becomes possible when those hierarchies are reorganised. This article builds from this concern with intermedial perception, but moves toward works in which the perceptual relation itself becomes the site of artistic intervention. It therefore turns from intermediality as a relation between media toward intermediality as the composition of perceptual conditions.
Phenomenology provides a useful lineage for this shift, because it offers a vocabulary for describing how experience is structured. The evolution of this field also mirrors the widening inclusion of embodied concepts in discussions of experience. Husserl’s account of intentionality frames consciousness as always directed toward something, allowing experience to be analysed not only in terms of what is perceived, but in terms of how it is perceived (Husserl Reference Husserl2012). Heidegger’s account of being-in-the-world further unsettles any idea of perception as a detached or purified act, emphasising that experience is shaped through worldly context, prior relations and situated involvement (Heidegger Reference Heidegger1962).
However, phenomenological accounts of perception have also often inherited the visual bias of Western philosophy, where seeing provides the dominant model for knowledge, clarity, distance and access to the world. For audiovisual practice, this is impactful because the apparent priority of sight is not only a matter of media convention. It is also embedded in inherited models of perception that shape how sensory relations are understood. Merleau-Ponty’s account of the lived body begins to move against this by grounding perception in ‘the body as our general medium for having a world’ (Merleau-Ponty Reference Merleau-Ponty2013: 147). Ihde’s auditory phenomenology pushes this decentring further, using listening to challenge visual models of perception and to foreground experience as embodied, spatial, relational and technologically mediated (Ihde Reference Ihde2007). From this perspective, sensory experience is neither neutral nor hierarchically fixed, but shaped through situated interactions between body, environment and technological mediation. Perception should be understood as enacted and negotiated through active engagement rather than passive reception (Noë Reference Noë2004).
These philosophical developments resonate strongly with intermedial concerns. If perception is embodied, mediated and relational, then the intermedial interaction of sound and image cannot be understood solely in formal or representational terms. It must also be understood as a sensory negotiation that unfolds through the integration, prioritisation and destabilisation of different perceptual cues.
1.1. The sonic turn and audiovisual practice
Within this discussion of audiovisual intermediality, an important influence is the growing prominence of sound within contemporary art practice, which has been described as a ‘sonic turn’. This shift within the wider art world marks a move away from visually dominated paradigms toward a broader consideration of listening, spatiality and wider sensory experience. Douglas Kahn has famously characterised the history of the arts as being shaped by a ‘presumption of mute visuality’, in which sound has been marginalised despite its ongoing presence across artistic practices (Kahn Reference Kahn2001: 2). Within this reorientation, sound is increasingly understood not simply as musical material, but as a medium that shapes perception through temporality, spatial diffusion and embodied orientation. Christoph Cox argues that sound transcends solely representational frameworks, describing it as a ‘continuous, anonymous flux’ that precedes and exceeds discrete musical or linguistic forms (Cox Reference Cox2009: 19). The incorporation of sound as a critical and material force allows previously suppressed dimensions of experience to be acknowledged and explored. From this perspective, sound is not confined solely as an object of composition, but a material condition that structures how experience unfolds.
This sonic reorientation has had significant implications for electroacoustic audiovisual practice. Historically, much electroacoustic audiovisual work has been shaped by traditions of experimental music, electronic music performance and studio-based composition, often realised as fixed works with clearly defined temporal and spatial boundaries. As Simon Emmerson observes, however, ‘the fixed seat proscenium becomes but one space and time of many’, reflecting a growing departure from singular listening situations toward more fluid modes of spatial and experiential engagement (Emmerson Reference Emmerson and Emmerson2000: 2).
As electroacoustic audiovisual practices increasingly move into gallery, installation and site-responsive contexts, their perceptual and spatial conditions become less tightly defined and uniform. In these settings, works are no longer encountered primarily as fixed temporal objects unfolding in a predetermined sequence. Instead, they are experienced as situated and embodied encounters that unfold through interaction with the audience and their environment. This trajectory parallels expanded-cinema and gallery-based moving-image practices, where audiovisual work is framed less as a fixed temporal artefact and more as a spatial and experiential encounter (Le Grice Reference Le Grice2009). The audience’s mode of engagement becomes fundamental to how the work is perceived and interpreted.
This shift opens a way of discussing intermediality through perceptual conditions rather than only through formal media relations. Sound and image operate within a shared perceptual field shaped by architectural space, bodily presence and environmental context. Rather than functioning as discrete or parallel media streams, audiovisual elements contribute to a multimodal experience in which perceptual organisation remains contingent and negotiated. Within such contexts, relationships between sound and image may serve to stabilise perception, but they may equally introduce ambiguity, tension or contradiction.
This article uses the term electroacoustic audiovisual practice to include fixed audiovisual composition, performance and installation-based forms in which electroacoustic sound, image, space and technological mediation are organised together. The case studies discussed later are installation-based, but they are treated as compositional works because they organise perceptual relations between sound, vision, body and environment. Composition here does not refer only to the sequencing of audiovisual material across a fixed duration, but also to the design of conditions through which perception is mediated, oriented and destabilised.
1.2. Experiential art and perceptual conditions
Within visual and installation art, perceptual experience has been central to what Dorothea von Hantelmann describes as an ‘experiential turn’ in contemporary practice. Von Hantelmann describes a growing number of artworks that are concerned with ‘what art does’ rather than what it represents or how it is structured, producing situations and encounters in which meaning emerges through experience (von Hantelmann Reference von Hantelmann2014). Perception is treated as an active, rather than passive, process through which the artwork unfolds. Artists such as James Turrell and Olafur Eliasson exemplify this approach through works that directly engage light, space and environmental conditions in order to shape how perception itself is experienced. Works such as Eliasson’s ‘Your Blue Afterimage’, shown in Figure 1, create perceptual artefacts that exist inside the audience, shifting the site of artistic expression to within the audience’s perception. In these works, audiences engage in an embodied encounter where the conditions of experience become the concern rather than their perception being treated as a neutral channel through which the artwork is accessed.
Olafur Eliasson ‘Your blue afterimage exposed.’ 2000.
Spotlight, dimmer, tripod, colour filter foil. Installation view: Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin © 2000 Olafur Eliasson.
The relevance of this experiential focus extends beyond visual art. As audiovisual and sound-based practices increasingly operate within installation-like contexts, similar questions arise concerning how perception is structured and negotiated across the senses. In such settings, the integration of sound, image, space and bodily movement can produce perceptual situations rather than fixed objects. Meaning emerges through the audience’s engagement with these conditions, rather than through the interpretation of a closed audiovisual text.
1.3. Perception as material for intermedial composition
The preceding discussion suggests that intermedial audiovisual composition is not only a matter of coordinating media, but of organising the perceptual conditions through which media are encountered. Sound, image, space and technological mediation do not simply combine as material layers. They are experienced through sensory relations that can stabilise, compete with, or unsettle one another.
Within electroacoustic audiovisual discourse, considerable attention has been given to media interaction, compositional structure and technological mediation. What remains less explicitly theorised is how these interactions are negotiated perceptually, particularly when sensory hierarchies are reinforced, disrupted or reorganised. If intermediality asks how media coexist and shape one another, it also invites consideration of the sensory relations through which media are perceived. The organisation of perception therefore becomes a useful site for understanding how electroacoustic audiovisual works are experienced, and how new compositional approaches might be developed.
This article brings the metaperceptual approach into this context as a way of recontextualising audiovisual works in which perception itself becomes a site of artistic intervention. More specifically, it focuses on Perceptual Translation: a subset of metaperceptual strategies concerned with the reorganisation of perceptual relations between sound, vision, space, body and technological mediation. In doing so, the article proposes Perceptual Translation not only as an analytical framework but also as a compositional strategy for developing works that treat perceptual relations as material. The following section introduces the metaperceptual framework by examining practices in which perception itself becomes the primary site of artistic intervention.
2. Metaperceptual sound art: perception as artistic material
Metaperceptual sound art describes artistic practice in which perception itself becomes the primary creative material (Johnston Reference Johnston2019). Rather than treating perception as a neutral channel through which artistic material is received, metaperceptual practices highlight perception as an active and situated process, designing sound, image, space and embodiment to draw attention to perceptual organisation itself. Meaning arises not only through representation or formal structure, but through the audience’s lived experience of perceptual reorientation or instability. Perception is therefore not only the means through which the work is received but also one of the conditions the artist designs and composes.
In this article, perception is not used as a synonym for sensation alone. Drawing on phenomenological and enactive accounts of perception, it refers to the embodied and situated organisation of experience, through which sensory information, attention, bodily orientation, memory and environmental context are brought into relation (Noë Reference Noë2004; Ihde Reference Ihde2007; Merleau-Ponty Reference Merleau-Ponty2013; Jensenius Reference Jensenius2022). This distinction is important because all artworks are perceptual in the general sense that they are received through the senses. The term metaperceptual marks a more specific reflexive condition, where perception itself becomes noticeable to the perceiver. A metaperceptual work does not simply produce an image, sound or event to be perceived, but creates conditions that may prompt the audience to become aware of how their own perception is operating. The artist therefore does not compose perception by determining a fixed inner experience, but designs situations in which perceptual relations can be exposed, shifted, or made unstable through the participant’s own embodied encounter with the work.
This investigation of perception also aligns with embodied music cognition, where listening is not treated as passive reception but as part of an active relation between body, action and environment. Noë’s claim that perception is something we do, rather than something that simply happens to us, shifts attention from sensory input alone to the actions through which perceptual worlds are explored (Noë Reference Noë2004). Drawing on Hurley’s action-perception model, Jensenius similarly describes musical experience through an action-perception loop, where movement changes what is heard and seen, while perceptual feedback guides further action (Hurley Reference Hurley1998; Jensenius Reference Jensenius2022). This is particularly important for works in which perception unfolds through situated encounter, including installation, soundwalk, performance and other audiovisual contexts where movement, orientation and attention shape how the work is experienced. Within sound art, Salomé Voegelin’s account of listening gives this embodied account a specifically sonic orientation. Voegelin argues that listening is ‘not a receptive mode but a method of exploration’, through which sound is ‘discovered, not received’, and through which knowledge is produced in the act of perception itself (Voegelin Reference Voegelin2010: 4). While Voegelin’s focus is explicitly sonic, her epistemological framing opens onto a broader possibility. As perception is an active process through which meaning is generated, artistic practices can intervene directly in how perceptual relations are organised and experienced.
The significance for metaperceptual sound art is that listening can be understood as one part of a broader perceptual organisation. Vision, hearing, spatial orientation and bodily movement function as interdependent processes through which coherent experience is produced. Metaperceptual works intervene in this integration, revealing perception as constructed rather than transparent. The broader metaperceptual framework includes several approaches to making perception available to experience, including deprivation, perceptual hacking and varied forms of perceptual translation (Johnston Reference Johnston2019). This article focuses on Perceptual Translation because it is the branch most directly concerned with relationships between sound, vision, space and embodiment.
2.1. Why a metaperceptual approach
The metaperceptual framework responds to an imbalance within sound-based and audiovisual practice identified above. While sound art discourse has increasingly emphasised listening, embodiment and experience, perceptual engagement has often remained implicit rather than explicitly framed as artistic material. In many cases, perception is assumed to function reliably or typically, serving as a conduit through which sonic or audiovisual content is accessed.
This assumption is particularly evident in traditions of reduced listening and analytical listening, where perceptual attention is trained toward sonic material while broader multisensory conditions remain underexamined. This emphasis is closely bound to the acousmatic condition, which Kane, following Schaeffer’s use of the Larousse definition, describes as ‘referring to a sound that one hears without seeing the causes behind it’ (Kane Reference Kane2014: 142). In this sense, reduced listening is not an everyday perceptual stance but a learned disciplinary practice that deliberately brackets out visual and contextual cues to attend to sound as an object of perception. This remains highly productive within acousmatic and studio traditions, but it becomes more limited when brought into electroacoustic audiovisual contexts, where image, space, bodily orientation and technological mediation actively participate in how sound is interpreted and organised.Footnote 1
This is not to say that reduced listening should be understood as disembodied. Godøy’s extension of Schaeffer complicates this reading to include elements of embodied perceptual schemata. For Godøy, reduced listening is ‘first of all a point of method’, a deliberate shift of attention toward the features of sound rather than an eradication of all embodied or contextual listening (Godøy Reference Godøy2006: 151). His discussion of stress-articulation shows that sonorous objects are not arbitrary fragments cut from a continuous stream, but perceived units shaped by energetic and qualitative discontinuities. Reduced listening may bracket causal and everyday signification, but it does not bracket basic perceptual schemata such as energy, articulation, discontinuity, contour and force. While Godøy shows that reduced listening is not naïve or disembodied, even when reduced listening is expanded through embodied cognition, the focus remains on how sound is constituted as a perceptual object.
Schaeffer, Smalley, Godøy and Thoresen each provide rich vocabularies for discussing sound objects, sonic morphology and the perceptual organisation of electroacoustic materials (Schaeffer Reference Schaeffer1966; Smalley Reference Smalley1997; Godøy Reference Godøy2006; Thoresen and Hedman Reference Thoresen and Hedman2007). These frameworks demonstrate that electroacoustic discourse has developed sophisticated ways of describing how sounds are perceived, segmented, shaped and understood over time. However, they remain primarily concerned with the perception and description of sound materials. Metaperceptual sound art shifts the emphasis from the perceptual organisation of sound objects toward the artistic organisation of perceptual relations across sound, image, space, body and technological mediation. Rather than asking how listeners should attend to sound, it asks how perception itself is structured and negotiated. In doing so, it provides a vocabulary for discussing and creating new works in which perceptual coherence is not assumed, but actively questioned.
2.2. Metaperceptual approaches in practice
Metaperceptual art is best understood as a field of related approaches rather than a singular aesthetic or method. It encompasses a range of practices that examine perception reflexively, including works that deprive, hack or transform the audience’s perceptual apparatus. Works such as Olafur Eliasson’s Your blue afterimage exposed (Eliasson Reference Eliasson2000) create perceptual artefacts by saturating the viewer’s visual field with intense colour and then abruptly withdrawing it, redirecting attention toward afterimages produced by the eye itself as they persist and shift over time. James Turrell’s Breathing Light (Turrell Reference Turrell2013) constructs a carefully controlled immersive light environment, bathing the audience in colour in which the absence of new visual information creates the Ganzfeld effect. Both works use perceptual oddities as core material, producing self-reflexive experiences of perception.
Within sound-based practice, comparable metaperceptual strategies emerge through works such as Maryanne Amacher’s Head Rhythm 1/Plaything (Amacher Reference Amacher1999), which uses perceptual artefacts as musical material. The work produces otoacoustic emissions within the listener’s inner ear, causing tones to be generated by the auditory system itself, transforming the audience’s perceptual system into not only receivers but producers. Other metaperceptual approaches utilise sonic deprivation, such as in Doug Wheeler’s PSAD Synthetic Desert III (Wheeler Reference Wheeler1971). The work explores deprivation of the aural sense by using an anechoic chamber in which silence is the experience. By experiencing sound without many of the cues ordinarily used to derive spatial and contextual information, the work exposes listening as an active and constructed process.
Metaperceptual practice is defined by a shared intent in making perceptual processes themselves available to experience, and less by shared techniques or media. Rather than operating through representation or symbolic reference, such works reveal perceptual conditions directly, allowing perception to become noticeable. In these moments, the audience’s own perceptual apparatus becomes part of the work’s material field.
Across this range of approaches, a distinct subset operates through intermedial relationships, where perception is negotiated across sound, vision, space and embodiment. In these practices, intermediality is not simply the formal interaction of media layers, but a perceptual condition shaped by how sensory cues align, conflict, or fail to stabilise. This subset provides the basis for the Perceptual Translation strategies outlined in the following section, both as analytical tools and as prompts for new work.
3. Perceptual Translation
Perceptual Translation describes a group of artistic strategies in which perceptual relationships are deliberately reorganised or composed to make themselves the object of focus. In this sense, translation does not refer to the transfer of content between media forms, but to the relocation or reconfiguration of perceptual perspective. The following subcategories are introduced as a pragmatic heuristic rather than a comprehensive classification, outlining recurring modes through which Perceptual Translation operates and suggesting directions for new work. These categories are not mutually exclusive, and many works combine multiple strategies or blur these distinctions.
3.1. Perspective Shifters
Perspective Shifters operate by relocating the perceptual point of view without altering the sensory apparatus. In these works, perception remains intact, but the position from which sensory information is experienced is displaced or shared. The perceptual shift is produced through a reconfiguration of perceptual position rather than sensory manipulation.
This strategy has a clear lineage in soundwalk and audio-walk traditions (Westerkamp Reference Westerkamp1974; Schafer Reference Schafer1977), where composition is often less concerned with arranging sonic material in isolation and more concerned with shaping how perspectives move through space and time. In such works, the artist’s role becomes the designer of perceptual location, composing how auditory perspective overlays the participant’s lived environment as they walk and engage in space. Perspective shifting, in this sense, becomes a compositional method for organising experience through the movement of viewpoints rather than through the transformation of sound objects. While not all soundwalks have metaperceptual elements, Janet Cardiff’s audio walk series offers an artistic exploration of perspective shifting which redirects the audience’s attention onto themselves (Cardiff and Miller Reference Cardiff and Millern.d.). In these works, participants navigate real environments while listening to binaural recordings that are spatially aligned with the surrounding space but temporally and narratively displaced. The listener hears footsteps, voices and environmental sounds that appear to belong to the present moment, while simultaneously recognising them as recorded traces of another time. This produces a persistent ambiguity about what is here and what is there. Vision and bodily movement continue to anchor the listener in the immediate environment, while sound introduces an alternative perceptual perspective that overlays, rather than replaces, lived experience.
Through this displacement, the soundwalk translates perceptual perspective and perceptual awareness emerges as the listener negotiates the relationship between visual confirmation, bodily movement and an auditory perspective that cannot be fully reconciled with the present moment. In this way, perspective shifting shows perception as a situated and relational process, revealing how perceptual coherence depends on the alignment of sensory perspective with spatial and temporal context.
3.2 . Perceptual Extenders
Perceptual Extenders operate by modifying or augmenting the sensory apparatus, expanding the range or focus of perception beyond its habitual limits. Unlike Perspective Shifters, which relocate the perceptual point of view while leaving sensory capacity intact, Perceptual Extenders intervene directly in how perception functions. Translation occurs through amplification or expansion of sensory input, making perceptual limits available for reflection.
Rébecca Kleinberger’s PHOX ears, shown in Figure 2 (Kleinberger et al. Reference Kleinberger, Dublon, Paradiso and Machover2015), offers a clear example of perceptual extension. The wearable device combines articulated parabolic microphones with bone-conduction transducers, allowing the user to physically aim their listening toward distant or otherwise imperceptible sound sources. The work extends the auditory field beyond ordinary spatial limits, while simultaneously revealing the bodily gestures through which listening is directed and controlled. It also changes the shape of the aural sense field, transforming its omnidirectionality into something more directional and controllable.
Rébecca Kleinberger ‘PHOX ears’. © Rébecca Kleinberger. Courtesy the artist.
In PHOX ears, perception is translated through extension rather than displacement as the act of listening itself is enlarged and externalised. Auditory attention becomes spatially exaggerated, directional and deliberate, revealing listening as an active and embodied practice shaped by physiological limits. This extension does not produce a seamless or transparent enhancement. The heightened focus and physicality of listening draw attention to mediation itself, making the listener acutely aware of how our perceptual access is structured and constrained under ordinary conditions.
3.3. Perceptual Mimesis
Perceptual Mimesis operates through the imitation or substitution of another perceptual system, allowing the audience to experience a sensory organisation that does not belong to them. This strategy translates perception by modelling an alternative perceptual logic and imposing it onto the audience’s sensorium. What is shared is not representation, but a perceptual logic.
A clear articulation of this approach can be found in Cleary Connolly’s Metaperceptual Helmets series, including works such as Chameleon, Horsehead and Hammerhead shown in Figure 3 (Cleary Connolly Reference Connolly2014). These devices alter the wearer’s sensory orientation by imposing non-human or functionally specialised perceptual configurations. Vision may be displaced laterally, vertically or temporally, while bodily orientation and motor feedback remain human. The wearer is not given access to an animal’s world representationally, but is placed inside a perceptual mismatch that reveals how deeply perception is tied to bodily structure and expectation.
Cleary Connolly ‘Hammerhead’. © Cleary Connolly. Courtesy the artists.
Within the framework of Perceptual Translation, Perceptual Mimesis demonstrates how sensory organisation can be treated as a composable structure. These works offer an embodied experience of how perceptual systems are not neutral or singular. By mimicking other arrangements, they speculate on perceptual possibilities rather than simply representing another being or sensory apparatus.
The examples discussed here are primarily visual, but the strategy is not limited to vision. The relative scarcity of aural examples points to an underexplored space for electroacoustic audiovisual practice. Aural mimesis presents different technical and perceptual challenges, because hearing cannot be rearranged through passive devices in the same way as sight. Sound propagates through space, and auditory perception depends on ear position, head movement, filtering, vibration and environmental acoustics. Works such as Lucier’s Vespers (Lucier Reference Lucier and Simon1980: 15–17) and Woebken and Okada’s Bat Vision Goggles (Woebken and Okada Reference Woebken and Okada2015) suggest possible auditory directions, using echolocation or ultrasonic translation to shift how listeners understand space. Here, mimesis refers less to representing another perceptual system than to composing conditions through which an alternative auditory logic can be encountered.
3.4. Perceptual Rearrangers
Perceptual Rearrangers operate by systematically reordering the relationships between sensory cues, bodily orientation and environmental feedback into unfamiliar combinations. The result is a reconfiguration of how perception is organised as a system.
Carsten Höller’s Upside-Down Goggles (Höller Reference Höller2001), shown in Figure 4, demonstrates this, as participants wear optical devices that invert the visual field vertically, causing the world to appear upside down. While the visual image is radically transformed, proprioceptive and vestibular systems remain unchanged. Over time, some participants report forms of partial perceptual adaptation, while others experience persistent disorientation. The work does not aim to simulate an alternative reality, but to expose the labour through which perceptual coherence is ordinarily achieved. Seeing becomes effortful, and orientation must be actively negotiated. The participant becomes aware not of what they are seeing, but of how seeing is being accomplished.
Carsten Höller, Upside-Down Goggles, 1994/2001 Artwork: © Carsten Höller Photo: © Attilio Maranzano Courtesy the artist.
Perceptual Rearrangers demonstrate how perception can be composed through the redistribution of sensory roles. Vision, balance and bodily movement are not treated as independent faculties, but as interdependent systems whose coordination can be artistically reconfigured. This highlights perception as dynamic and adaptive, rather than a fixed and neutral interface with the world.
Perspective Shifters, Perceptual Extenders, Perceptual Mimesis and Perceptual Rearrangers demonstrate how perceptual translation can function as a generative strategy across a range of artistic contexts. In each case, the work produces a situation in which perception becomes the site of experience and reflection. These works establish non-exhaustive strategies for analysing existing works and generating new ones. The following case studies extend these principles through a series of audiovisual works by the author. Rather than applying Perceptual Translation as an external interpretive lens, these works are conceived from within it, using perceptual reorganisation as a primary compositional material.
4. Case studies: Perceptual Translation in practice
This section examines how Perceptual Translation operates as an intermedial strategy through two related but distinct works. Your Localisation Exposed functions as the primary case study, demonstrating how perceptual translation can be enacted through sustained audiovisual conflict. Your Hearing Them is then introduced as a secondary case, extending the framework by showing how perceptual translation can also operate through interpersonal auditory exchange, with the visual field functioning as a stabilising rather than disruptive element. Together, these works begin to explore Perceptual Translation not as a single technical method, but a compositional orientation that can operate across different perceptual registers.
4.1. Your Localisation Exposed: Perceptual Rearranger
Your Localisation Exposed is a wearable sound installation that intervenes directly in the perceptual organisation of auditory space. Participants wear a bespoke headset, shown in Figure 5, incorporating binaural microphones and headphones, configured to invert the left and right channels of the auditory field in real time. In doing so, the work flips the wearer’s aural perspective, with left becoming right, and vice versa, while vision and bodily orientation remain unchanged. Participants are invited to walk and explore their environment, while renegotiating their perceptual relations. As participants move and try to orient themselves within the environment, actions that ordinarily rely on seamless multisensory integration become uncertain. Turning toward a sound source results in increased disorientation rather than correction. In this way, the work exposes the often subconscious role auditory localisation plays in spatial orientation, and shows how strongly it depends on the alignment of multiple perceptual cues.
Blake Johnston ‘Your Localisation Exposed’ headset and electronics. External microphones are positioned near the ears, with each microphone routed to the opposite headphone channel.
The headset was built from a pair of industrial hearing-protection headphones, adapted with external microphones positioned close to the ears and a small battery-powered amplification system. The isolation provided by the headphones plays an important role, as it reduces the spill of unmediated environmental sound and allows the inverted auditory field to become the dominant listening condition. The electronics are intentionally simple and housed in a wooden box, allowing the wearer to easily carry the system while exploring their altered auditory field, as shown in Figure 6. The work does not transform the sound through software or introduce composed audio material. Instead, the live sound of the environment is amplified to approximate ordinary listening levels and returned to the opposite ear.
Wearing the headset while exploring a busy environment.
The sonic material of the work is therefore the mediated live acoustic environment itself. Footsteps, voices, room tone, traffic and incidental sounds remain recognisable, but become spatial events whose locations can no longer be trusted. The work is most effective in environments with enough discrete sound events to localise, but not so much activity that individual sources become impossible to separate. The compositional intervention lies in the routing and mediation of these sounds, rather than in their selection or sequencing.
Vision remains ordinary. The participant continues to see the room, the people and the events around them from their own bodily position, while the headset returns those same events as a reversed auditory field. A person speaking on the participant’s left may be seen on the left but heard on the right. A footstep, passing body or nearby gesture becomes a small test of whether sight or sound should be trusted. The audiovisual relationship is therefore produced through the participant’s attempt to reconcile stable visual orientation with unstable auditory localisation.
In exhibition contexts, this often produced a slow and tentative mode of movement. Participants visually scanned the environment while checking whether heard events corresponded to visible ones. Some tested the system directly through small gestures, such as clicking near one ear or turning toward a visible sound source to confirm the nature of the inversion. These actions indicate how the work invites checking, recalibration and self-observation. The participant’s movement becomes part of the work’s unfolding, as each turn of the head or body tests the relationship between auditory and visual orientation. Read through an embodied action-perception lens, the work therefore disrupts the expected relation between movement and perceptual feedback. Turning the head or body ordinarily helps to confirm the location of a sound source. In Your Localisation Exposed, the same action intensifies the contradiction, making orientation itself the site of perceptual inquiry.
The work thus operates as a Perceptual Rearranger in dialogue with Carsten Höller’s Upside-Down Goggles, reorganising sensory relationships so that perceptual organisation becomes active and contingent. In both works, the metaperceptual effect arises through enactment rather than explanation. Participants are not instructed to attend to perception as a concept, nor guided toward a specific interpretive framework. Awareness emerges through lived contradiction, as perception fails to behave as expected. Your Localisation Exposed extends this strategy in a more explicitly intermedial and intersensory direction, as the disruption of auditory localisation reveals the often unconscious role hearing plays in spatial orientation, bodily movement and environmental awareness. In this way, Your Localisation Exposed exemplifies Perceptual Translation as a way for electroacoustic audiovisual practice to be approached through an intermedial perceptual lens.
4.2. Your Hearing Them: Perspective Shifter
While Your Localisation Exposed operates through spatial rearrangement, Your Hearing Them explores Perceptual Translation through interpersonal exchange and perspective shifting. Rather than translating space or time, it translates a perceptual perspective between people. The work’s motivation lies in the unique experience of hearing one’s own voice. Self-hearing is materially different from how others hear us, as it is shaped by bone conduction and bodily resonance. People are often confronted when hearing a recorded version of themselves, as they feel it does not sound like them. In Your Hearing Them, the voice is treated not only as speech or semantic communication but also as an embodied sonic object whose identity shifts depending on the position from which it is heard. The work extends this disjunction by allowing participants to hear another person’s voice closer to the way that person hears themself.
Your Hearing Them consists of a pair of wearable headsets, shown in Figure 7, with surface transducers and headphones that two participants use to have a face-to-face conversation. Each headset contains a microphone positioned close to the mouth, speakers positioned over the ears and surface transducers coupled to the cheekbones. The microphone captures the wearer’s voice and sends it to the other headset, through amplification and filtering stages, where it is reproduced through both speakers and bone conduction. The speakers provide clarity and exteriority, while the transducers reintroduce some of the low-frequency bodily resonance normally available only to the person speaking.
Blake Johnston ‘Your hearing them’.
This combination of speakers and transducers was not simply a technical decision. In the development of the work, a small user study was used to compare speaker-only, transducer-only and combined configurations, as well as the balance between each component and any filtering needed to be applied to best recreate the experience of self-hearing. Participants recorded themselves speaking, then listened back through the headset while adjusting frequency and gain through filters to tune the system. Participants consistently preferred the combined version, describing the speakers and transducers as performing different but complementary roles: the speakers gave fidelity and spatial exteriority, while the transducers contributed depth, resonance and bodily presence. The final system therefore translates auditory perspective through a constructed approximation, because each person’s voice, skull resonance and self-perception are different.
The visual dimension of the work plays a deliberately restrained role. Participants remain face-to-face, seeing the other person’s mouth, body and conversational gestures in ordinary social space. This visual stability reinforces the reality of the encounter rather than replacing it with simulation. The perceptual displacement occurs because the visible speaking body is familiar, while the auditory perspective is not. The participant sees another person speaking, but hears a version of the voice that includes aspects of that person’s normally private self-hearing.
In exhibition contexts, this often turned conversation into a form of testing. Once participants recognised that they were hearing a mediated version of the other person’s self-hearing, listeners frequently asked their partner to say particular words, sustain sounds, or make different vocal gestures. The social exchange therefore became a perceptual experiment. Conversation remained present, but its ordinary function was partly displaced by an attempt to encounter another person’s voice from a listening position normally unavailable to the listener.
Together, Your Localisation Exposed and Your Hearing Them demonstrate how Perceptual Translation can operate across different perceptual axes. One intervenes in spatial orientation, the other in interpersonal subjectivity. Both enact perceptual reorganisation directly, allowing metaperceptual awareness to arise through experience. By using perceptual relationships as artistic material, these works demonstrate how Perceptual Translation can function generatively. It offers a means of conceiving new work that does not rely on spectacle, illusion or media complexity, but instead engages the instability and negotiability of perception itself. In this way, Perceptual Translation functions both as an analytical framework and a compositional strategy.
5. Conclusion and future work
Perceptual Translation offers a way to expand the intermedial discourse on audiovisual composition into the design of perceptual conditions, rather than the coordination of media layers. It focuses on what sound and image do together, and on the sensory negotiations their interaction produces. This shift extends electroacoustic audiovisual practice beyond inherited models of synchronisation, narrative coherence and representational correspondence, and toward works that compose orientation, attention and embodied sense making.
Your Localisation Exposed and Your Hearing Them show an initial range of what this approach can generate. The strategies outlined earlier offer further directions for practice. Perspective Shifters open a space where perceptual perspective can be shared across bodies and social situations. Perceptual Extenders explore the limits of our perceptual fields, and engage with stimuli that often go unheard or unseen. Perceptual Mimesis questions the neutrality of the human perceptual apparatus, and explores how the sensory world of other species can be vastly different to ours. Lastly, Perceptual Rearrangers speculate on possible new relationships and orientations, and by doing so, reveal underlying processes that inform how we orient ourselves in the world. Hybrid strategies that combine multiple approaches can extend these concepts further, where translation is not a single event but something that can shift over time through movement, interaction and participation.
Perceptual Translation is most relevant where perceptual relations are deliberately made available as part of the work’s material structure. This does not limit the framework to installation-based practice. In fixed electroacoustic audiovisual composition, perceptual translation may be shaped through temporal form, spatialisation, screen image, montage, loudspeaker arrangement or the listener’s position within a defined listening situation. In performance, soundwalk or installation contexts, the participant’s movement, duration of engagement, bodily orientation and proximity to the work may become part of the perceptual structure. The framework therefore transfers across contexts, but not through identical means. Each format produces different conditions through which perceptual relations can be composed, encountered and reflected upon.
Because Perceptual Translation often works through ordinary perceptual expectations, it can be legible without specialised listening practices. Its impact, however, depends on legibility, intensity, access and framing. If the perceptual shift is too subtle, it may remain unnoticed. If it is too opaque or intense, it may produce confusion or discomfort without allowing the audience to negotiate the relation being altered. These limitations were evident in the development of both case-study works. In Your Localisation Exposed, the perceptual rearrangement became less effective in very quiet environments, where there were too few discrete sound events for the inversion to become apparent. It also risked becoming opaque in overly dense sound environments, where individual sound sources could no longer be separated clearly enough for the listener to test the contradiction between auditory and visual cues. In Your Hearing Them, early tests showed a different kind of boundary. Speaker-only versions tended to evoke the voice as mediated playback, while transducer-only versions foregrounded bodily resonance but reduced clarity. The work became more legible only when exterior vocal sound and bodily resonance were balanced together. More broadly, works that depend on ordinary perceptual expectations need to account for differences in hearing, mobility, sensory sensitivity, spatial orientation and prior experience. These conditions are part of the design of the work, shaping how perceptual conflict can be encountered meaningfully and with enough participant agency to allow reflection.
Perceptual Translation offers a practical set of strategies for analysis and creation within intermedial audiovisual practice. It frames intermediality as something experienced through perception, rather than only described through relations between media materials. By treating perceptual organisation as artistic material, it supports both analysis and the development of new electroacoustic audiovisual works that compose perception as an active site of experimentation.
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