Syren, a location-based, multi-speaker augmented audio reality installation was presented as a shipboard exhibit at the 12th International Symposium on Electronic Art in August 2004. It was conceived as a continuous 3-day spatial audio experience that augments the landscape through the Baltic archipelago with location-based audio media, spatialised through a 12channel speaker array. As the ship tracks between Helsinki, Mariehamn, Stockholm and Tallinn, listeners on the upper deck hear sounds that are perceived to originate from geographic features. Our custom GIS is derived from electronic nautical charting information that includes coastlines, buoys and beacons. A handheld GPS provides both position and direction data that was used by a software system to drive parameters of the spatial audio presentation. The sound production for the artwork was created using the custom application that enabled the artist to place sound media in relation to a real-world map. An important component to this software was the ability to audition the audio experience without ever taking the journey.

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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.

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