javier hermosa martin & jan proest
The hidden sounds of Ku’damm is a project in which the authors try to reveal to the audience the acoustic “hidden worlds” of everyday environments in an artistic way, in this case the environment of the Kurfürstendamm.
Sound atmospheres are easily differentiated due to their sonic characteristics namely loudness, quality of the sounds, rythmic characteristics, frequencies, overtone composition etc.
In our everyday experience, we perceive sounds and acoustic atmospheres through a selective perception that disallows us to acquire the whole of these environments and atmospheres. Our ear, due to its restriction to a range of ~20Hz-~16Khz in the frequency spectrum, eliminates a lot of the sonic content of our environment. This loss finds its reason in the lack of necessity of conscious perception in ranges different to the specified, although sounds included in these inaudible ranges can contain information and indeed influence our organisms and perception. An example is the “low frequency oscillation” 7Hz, which can be produced by mechanical devices and that can trigger nausea or other non-desired effects in humans due to the inharmonic interaction with the alpha brainwaves, which are normally on the 8Hz frequency range (actually between 8-12Hz).
On the other hand side, not only mechanical devices which are visible or invisible to the walker produce “hidden” sounds, but also other members of the ecosystem of a city can perceive and produce “hidden” sounds. Cats, dogs, bats, mice, rats, squirrels, birds, they all can perceive and some of them can produce ultrasounds that fill the environment of this inaudible world.
This project is therefore oriented in bringing the inaudible sounds of these different atmospheres mentioned above to the listener in the form a radio play consisting on a tour in which the environments will be presented “as they are” and contrasted with the sounds that are “hidden”. The listener will perform a tour through one of the most significant streets of the city of Berlin, the Kurfürstendamm, discovering and experiencing all these normally inaudible sounds; listening the ecosystem of the city with the ears that we don’t have.
Technical Implementation
recording
Ambient recordings at different locations representing the Microecosystems of the Kurfürstendamm will be performed using a self made Ultrasound microphone and a 192Khz-able Audio Interface, obtaining different digital samples.
audification
The audification is performed by using a downpitching technique. The number of octaves of downpitching is different for each recording in order to obtain audible sounds in useful frequency ranges.