3rd Rock’s Nuna gallery hosts sonic art exhibit

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Synapse art exhibit at the Nuna Art Gallery. (Image courtesy Nuna Art Gallery.)

A sonic art exhibit title “Synapse” will have its grand opening at the Nuna Art Gallery on 3rd Rock Grid  This Sunday, June 14, at 11 a.m. Pacific Time.

This exhibition is an interactive sound installation where viewers are part of the work. Created as a collaboration between Lorin Tone, whose sonic installations grace a number of grids, and Nuna’s curator Alia Soulstar, Synapse is described by Soulstar as “a music that challenges music.”

The grand opening will feature presentations by gallery curator Alia Soulstar and artist Lorin Tone. Tone is a well-established virtual sonic artist, with another work in the Nuna Gallery and also in Second Life.

Its sonic component lacks melody, harmony, tempo, counterpoint or any of the other features normally considered integral to music. Instead it sets up an “ambient field of disorganized sound” where each listener becomes the organizing principle for their own sonic experience. Lorin has tuned the instrument but you, the listener/viewer, are the composer.

Visually the installation draws attention to granular brain architecture. A synapse is a site of transmission of electrical nerve impulses between neurons.

Neurons hold information—all of your cognition, memories, models and symbols are stored in your vast library of brain cells. What makes you unique as a person is your extreme potential for original and creative thought, which comes from having such a vast store of information connected by so many possible pathways. There are 86 billion neurons in a human brain, with five to seven dendrites per neuron and 40 synapses per dendrite. That constitutes a near infinity of wired and unwired pathways a thought can take on its journey through your grey matter.

In Synapse you are invited to rewire a sonic network by moving through it as an agent of free will.

After the grand opening, the exhibit will be on indefinite permanent display at the gallery.

Hypergrid addresss: grid.3rdrockgrid.com:8002:The Nuna Gallery.

About the artist

Lorin Tone understands how important sound and sound effects are in virtual environments. A steampunk aircraft that hums, groans and hisses as it chugs past creates more magic than one that slides quietly across a quiet sky. A virtual forest with creaking branches, wind, water sounds and birdsong is more magical than a silent one. It’s a no-brainer really. Why don’t we apply the same attention to environmental sounds that we apply to other aspects of building our paradises?

Lorin Tone

Tone has compiled huge libraries of sounds for Second Life and OpenSim which he distributes through his various stores. He makes custom sounds too, on request, and uses randomizers and sequencers to make them as natural sounding and seamless as possible.

He also works with visual artists to create sound sculptures that exploit the unique potential of virtual reality. His work Aurora, an artistic collaboration in Second Life with Elicio Ember—featured by the Hannington Endowment for the Arts in 2019—was picked up by the Nuna Gallery on 3rd Rock Grid for permanent display. It is described in the Nuna exhibition notes as “a beautiful mesmeric meditation, an elegy, a calm that addresses a storm.”

With a background in sound engineering after formal training at BYU, Chico State, Stanislaus State and Santa Cruz, training in classical organ and harpsichord, Tone is also a former orchestral percussionist and a pipe organist, and he has played in numerous bands. He has worked in video editing where he developed a nuanced understanding of the relationship between image and sound.

You can find his Unknown Country store in Second Life, and, in OpenSim, at Digiworldz’ Westwood Towers, Discovery Grid’s Whiskey Bay and 3rd Rock Grid’s Shopping Geode.

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