Noise pollution, often overlooked among other environmental issues, is a growing concern in many urban areas. Traffic congestion, construction work, and industrial activities contribute to excessive noise levels that can lead to health problems such as stress, sleep disturbances, and hearing loss.
When we were invited to create a new installation for the MDF Festival by the Philharmonic of Szczecin (which belongs to top three noisiest cities in Poland) we decided to create an artwork that would comment on the theme of noise pollution and subversively confront the audience with the noisy city soundscape within a context of a space thats associated with drastically different – pleasant and orderly – sound experience. By creating such unexpected situation we hoped to bring public attention to the issue of noise pollution and spark of public debate amongst the philharmonic audience.
The installation is a rather large structure of 4,5m in height and about 7m of diameter that allows the audience to get surrounded by the spatialised audio emitted from the 8 motorised trolleys of bespoke design that were engineered from scratch for the purpose of this project. The audiovisual choreography is driven by custom software that remotely controls the light, sound and movement. In terms of sound design we used sounds sampled from the noisiest parts of Szczecin and transformed them in realtime using dedicated pure data audio patch – controlling the playback in sync with movement and light emitted by the trolleys.
Project collaborators:
Krzysztof Chrzanowski – construction & mechanical engineering
Grzegorz “Farad” Pietrzyk – electronics engineering
LS Project – on-site construction setup
Special thanks:
Szczecin Philharmonic team
Respect Energy S.A.
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Commissioned by Szczecin Philharmonic
Patron of the project – Respect Energy S.A
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Photos by Maciej Jędrzejewski
