Another strand of my thought about Umwelt, specifically in the context of visualising the 'experience' of a self-driving car. I was thinking about Alvin Lucier's 'I Am Sitting in a Room'. This is an experimental audio work that features Lucier, as you might guess, sitting in a room. He reads from a script into a recorder ('I am sitting in a room, different from the one you are in now...'), then plays back that recording into the recorder, then plays back that recording into the... etc. You can listen to the piece on YouTube here.
You can look at the effect from a physical or experiential point of view. Physically, each new cycle amplifies specific things about the recording -- in particular, the resonant frequencies of the room, though presumably also other elements like imperfections in the recording medium. The experiential side is the slow dissolution of signal into noise -- a recognisable speech that begins to buzz and echo, steadily losing coherency until it's something alien and atonal. Even then, we can still hear something of the original -- the cadence and rhythm of Lucier's speech. Until at last, we don't, and we're left with something haunting and ethereal.
There's an intersection with a couple of things here. First off is where I started this note -- the idea of Umwelt and the visualisation of the self-driving car. Reinforcing what's demarcated as important and taking away what isn't gets us closer -- in a very limited way -- to the car's Umwelt. Does Lucier bring us closer, even a little, to the theoretical Umwelt of a room experiencing sounds?
(See here for a snapshot of James Bridle's visualisations, titled 'Activations'.)
The other is writing, where the process of revision is taking away everything that is not the thing and reinforcing the stuff that is the thing. That's my highly unsophisticated description of 'theme' and resonance in writing, but it's often the part of revision that makes a work really shine. Finding the resonant frequencies of the piece and looping through them until we have something new and interesting, or even haunting and ethereal.
Last thought: this is an example of encoding a property of physical space into an audio medium. I Am Sitting in a Room has fascinated for years, and continues to do so.