Journey to the Center of Sound

We are a collective of 4 artists who have been working together for a long time. As partners, we have so far developed projects including music production, sound poetry, heritage conservation, and 3D/VR design. In one of these projects, we went to Iceland to conserve the acoustic heritage of Thingvellir National Park (https://thingvelliracoustics.tumblr.com/).

This project was awarded by the i-portunus fund of the European Commission in 2021 for promoting high standards of intervention, research and heritage education. Also, It was shortlisted for the European Heritage Award, a competition that identifies and promotes best practices in the conservation and enhancement of tangible and intangible cultural heritage. In Iceland, we not only dedicated ourselves to this project but also traveled all over the country recording different sounds and acoustics. What we got was extremely different from what we are used to, as Iceland’s unique nature, adverse weather and geological phenomena took us on a sonic journey with its own unique imprint.

Inspired by Jules Verne’s novel “Journey to the Center of the Earth”, we decided to take our portable recorders closer to Snaefellsjökul, the famous Icelandic volcano that takes the protagonists of this famous story to the depths of the earth. This is our starting point to create an immersive sound piece called “Journey to the Center of Sound” where sounds, soundscapes, acoustic reverberation, music from our band Hoarfrost mixed with lighting and fog to create a unique composition based on this experience.

In mathematics, in science, a substantial part of the knowledge results from the analysis of the boundary conditions, of the edges. Iceland represents this. It is to be at the end of the earth and listen to how our geography is (de) built. It is listening to the past when everything was ice, seeing what it was like and how it recedes. It is listening to how new land emerges from the center of the planet. As Axel and Otto Lidenbrock in 1864 Jules Verne novel Voyage au centre de la Terre, who, equipped with food, tools, weapons, instruments, flashlights and a first aid kit, set out on the journey to Iceland, we traveled with equipments that opened us a new dimension to listening. Microphones that record electromagnetic fields, vibrations, 360 degrees, or pressure waves in liquid media. With these tools we listened and recorded how glaciers, geysers, lava caves, polar winds and waterfalls sounds beyond human hearing limits.

In the aural experience, a sound object is often perceived as a whole. But, in most of the cases this sound is produced by a sum of sounds. Each of one corresponds to a vibration of a specific physical process of that object. This sum of sounds can be understood as an acoustic synthesis. In Journey to the center of the sound we work in that direction, trying to focus on each sound in order to create a new aural object.
Spaces reverberation defined as the sum of reflected sound of each space surface creates the most relevant human sense of location. Working with ambisonic impulse responses allows us to build new immersive acoustic spaces where sound objects can be taken and placed in a new sound and space relation. Auralization permits us to build a sound story that changes the stereo paradigm. In other words, to build a sound story from the inside and the outside, from the bottom and the top or from the loud and the quiet.

So, this sound journey, beyond aesthetics, seeks to relate space with the past, present and future by offering a wider and fresh focus of sound cartography and acoustic ecology.

In 2022, this work was awarded the Goethe Institute Virtual Preparation Grant for Residencies and was selected to be part of the Monom Residency in Berlin, the UK Sonic Mapping Conference Residency and will be installed on the 25 loudspeakers at the phonos foundation in Barcelona. during 2023. All of these workspaces offer different audio systems and philosophies for spatial audio and immersive sound experience. For this reason, “Journey to the Center of Sound” was composed to be dynamically translated to different scenarios.

THE FIELD RECORDINGS

Journey to the Center of the Sound includes ambisonic and stereo soundscapes and acoustic impulse responses recorded during 2021 from the following icelandic spaces:

• Thingvellir Park
• Ásmundarsafn Dome Center
• Hallgrímskirkja
• HARPA
• Leiðarendi
• Sólheimajökull Ice Cave
• Askja ICP
• Krýsuvík
• Rauðfeldsgjá Gorge
• Plane and Roadtrip various
• Iceland University Of The Arts

THE NARRATIVE AND THE NARRATORS

Narrative design and composition are led by sound artist and poet Ginebra Raventós. https://ginebraraventosdevolart.bandcamp.com/releases
Narrators include Nick Wright (USA), Peni (CAT), Ásta Fanney (ISL), Eduard Escofet (CAT), and Barbara Held (USA)

THE MUSIC SCORE
Music pieces of our ambient project “Hoarfrost” will be included.
https://hoarfrost2022.bandcamp.com/album/