A Community Moving with Air in the immersive Sound Installation HUELLAS DE AIRE (Traces of Air)

Ximena Alarcón-Díaz, Esteban Henao, Ron Herrema, Adriana María Gutiérrez-Grisales, Juan Felipe Amaya-Álvarez, and Jorge Bejarano Barco

Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression

Abstract

HUELLAS DE AIRE is an immersive interactive sound installation that invites audiences to immerse in a soundscape where breath and air intertwine with memory, emotions, and urban ecology. The work explores the profound emotional connection between human breathing, air, and memories in the urban environment of Medellín, Colombia. It displays sound traces of air left by fourteen participants who experienced a three-Day workshop involving Deep Listening, data sonification and sound sensor interaction at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín, fostering an attentive and inclusive awareness of the soundscape and their memories of breathing in the city. The work is activated by eight proximity sensors and one microphone sensor surrounding the sides and ceiling of the exhibition space. Audiences can move guided by poetic invitations projected on the wall and immerse in the listening of sonic variations while activating the data from PM 2.5 particles measured in the city. The space becomes a collective interface for relational listening that changes sound frequencies and generative sounds according to the movements of people in the space, which randomly triggers prerecorded sounds of individual and collective breathing experiences of participants in the workshop. Although commissioned as a solo artist installation, the layers of community engagement with the installation (ideation, implementation, and interaction) activated a complex interface for collective listening that led to experimentation with body movement and sound combinations, using Pure Data/BELA, sonification of air data, and ambisonic sound spatialisation, engaging us in a communal environmental dialogue using critical pollution data with a poetic approach for a human emotional experience. Furthermore, emergent metaphors from the audience experience leads us to develop interfaces for relational listening as a collective instrument to engage with environmental data as tacit presence of the vital air we breathe.

Citation

Ximena Alarcón-Díaz, Esteban Henao, Ron Herrema, Adriana María Gutiérrez-Grisales, Juan Felipe Amaya-Álvarez, and Jorge Bejarano Barco. 2026. A Community Moving with Air in the immersive Sound Installation HUELLAS DE AIRE (Traces of Air). Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20784220 [PDF]

BibTeX Entry

@inproceedings{nime2026_70,
 abstract = {HUELLAS DE AIRE is an immersive interactive sound installation that invites audiences to immerse in a soundscape where breath and air intertwine with memory, emotions, and urban ecology. The work explores the profound emotional connection between human breathing, air, and memories in the urban environment of Medellín, Colombia. It displays sound traces of air left by fourteen participants who experienced a three-Day workshop involving Deep Listening, data sonification and sound sensor interaction at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín, fostering an attentive and inclusive awareness of the soundscape and their memories of breathing in the city. The work is activated by eight proximity sensors and one microphone sensor surrounding the sides and ceiling of the exhibition space. Audiences can move guided by poetic invitations projected on the wall and immerse in the listening of sonic variations while activating the data from PM 2.5 particles measured in the city.  The space becomes a collective interface for relational listening that changes sound frequencies and generative sounds according to the movements of people in the space, which randomly triggers prerecorded sounds of individual and collective breathing experiences of participants in the workshop. Although commissioned as a solo artist installation, the layers of community engagement with the installation (ideation, implementation, and interaction) activated a complex interface for collective listening that led to experimentation with body movement and sound combinations, using Pure Data/BELA, sonification of air data, and ambisonic sound spatialisation, engaging us in a communal environmental dialogue using critical pollution data with a poetic approach for a human emotional experience. Furthermore, emergent metaphors from the audience experience leads us to develop interfaces for relational listening as a collective instrument to engage with environmental data as tacit presence of the vital air we breathe.},
 address = {London, United Kingdom},
 articleno = {70},
 author = {Ximena Alarcón-Díaz and Esteban Henao and Ron Herrema and Adriana María  Gutiérrez-Grisales and Juan Felipe  Amaya-Álvarez and Jorge Bejarano Barco},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression},
 doi = {10.5281/zenodo.20784220},
 editor = {Benedict Gaster and João Tragtenberg and Anna Xambó and Tom Mitchell},
 issn = {2220-4806},
 month = {June},
 note = {},
 numpages = {12},
 pages = {593--604},
 presentation-video = {https://youtu.be/lCOmTg5O_Sg},
 title = {A Community Moving with Air in the immersive Sound Installation HUELLAS DE AIRE (Traces of Air)},
 track = {Paper},
 url = {http://nime.org/proceedings/2026/nime2026_70.pdf},
 year = {2026}
}