Overview
Meridian Tower is a multi-participant interactive sonic narrative in which five participants receive different fragments of the same unfolding event. Each person has access to different information, resources, and forms of authority, while their individual decisions alter a shared public environment.
Rather than using sound primarily as atmosphere or accompaniment, the work treats sound as part of the narrative system itself. Private headphone channels determine what each participant is able to know, while spatialized public sound communicates events, consequences, and shifts in collective conditions. The resulting experience asks how responsibility is perceived when causality is distributed across multiple people and media.
Research Question
When causal responsibility is distributed across multiple participants, information channels, and media, how can sound make this causal structure perceptible, and interpretable?
Listening as System
Sound functions across three states in Meridian Tower. As private evidence, as a public record through which partial information becomes shared narrative, and as consequence when earlier decisions return through the system.
Writing
Composing Consequence: Sound as an Operative Narrative System in Multi-Participant Interactive Digital Narrative
Using Meridian Tower as a practice-based case study, the article examines how sound can operate as part of an interactive narrative system rather than primarily as atmosphere or feedback. It develops a framework in which sound distributes partial knowledge, registers participants’ decisions, and later reconstructs their consequences, making collective responsibility perceptible and re-attributable.
Manuscript in preparation for submission to Organised Sound.
Recognition
Selected Project, IDEAS (Initiative for Digital Exploration of Arts and Sciences), Qualcomm Institute, UC San Diego, 2026
Peer-reviewed interdisciplinary artist residency and public performance
UCSD Experimental Theater — 62 speakers, 2025