Sentiment is a multi-sensory experience, delivering layered audio through seven speakers to one audience member at a time. Here are four things I learned from artist Diane Wiltshire’s Lunchtime Talk about Sentiment:

1. Diane interviewed over 50 participants, asking them 40 questions over an hour. She posed questions that would provoke opinion. Setting out by asking, “Can we catch well-being and ill-being?” The question which produced a lot of dialogue was, “how do you feel about the decisions politicians make on your behalf?”.

2. During the interviews, the participants’ electrodermal activity (EDA) was measured through their wrist. EDA assesses the variation of electrical properties in the skin, in response to sweat secretion. To put it another way, Diane was measuring arousal without distinguishing between positive and negative.

3. Diane curated this rich audio material into a three-hour multi layered soundscape played in an immersive environment that could be controlled by a solitary audience member. With rigorous user testing, Diane found that it only took a few minutes for audience members to adjust and tune their hearing in to multiple voices simultaneously. The experience comprises seven speakers, and an open invitation for the audience member to move around the space and be active in their listening and choices about which voices to listen to. Diane made a conscious decision to avoid any visual elements to the work encouraged audience to focus their attention on listening.

4. The EDA of the original participants was translated into vibrations through a haptic interface worn by the audience member. The vest vibrates according to the response of the original participant, vibrating very gently at the base of the spin when EDA reading is low. When there is a high reading the vibrations run up their back and over their shoulders. Diane found that the interpretation of the different sensations seemed to be directly connected to the content of the soundscape not the intensity of sensation.
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Sentiment is a living project, and can be found at BOM, Birmingham Open Media in December.