Sound Diaries
Cannes Lions Festival 2013, France
Mixed Media Sound Installation
with Lambie – Nairn / WPP / Brand Union
2013
Sound Diaries was a multi-channel sound installation that ran for seven days in the duration of Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
Commissioned by Lambie–Nairn to celebrate the role of “collecting” in creativity, I presented artefacts from my sound archive consisting of over ten years worth of binaural sound walks.
The sounds were diffused through a network of forty speakers in a configuration that changed daily. Sounds were composed and distributed through the space via a system of algorithmic generation I programmed to reflect the notion of chance encounters in the act collecting.
Visitors were invited to walk through the room, and listen to independent “stories” unfold. As they weaved through the various fragmentary glimpses of conversations, music and other sonic material unique narratives would unfold as an emergent property of the visitor’s interaction with the space.
I wanted to create a representation of our everyday soundscape and transpose it into a listening environment in order to explore the agency of the listener and to study how one may go about navigating a complex acoustic environment of overlapping sounds, noises and voices to arrive at some form of meaning or narrative.
The participant can experiment with various modalities of listening. They can perceive the soundscape as noise when heard as a whole and/or from a distance, or by shifting their attention to individual speakers listening from up close. The installation reveals the ongoing tension inherent in the dualistic nature of signal and noise. Both states occurring simultaneously yet profoundly different depending on the subjective intention and active intervention of the listener’s will.