featured_bg_

A sound installation as part of the larger exhibition SOAK, at the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), Mumbai in May 2009.
SOAK is an exhibition and book project by Anuradha Mathur and Dhilip De Cuhna who have focused their artistic and design expertise for the past decade on cultural and ecological issues of contentious landscapes.

rajivan_ayyappan_02

Sound mapping Mithi River as an independent sound installation was designed to to compliment the SOAK discourses. It is a sound creation based on field recordings; a kind of projection of the acoustic environment of the Mithi River, as a sonorous data, perhaps musical in an eclectic sense.

The project had two phases:
a series of walks (14 days) along the Mithi river terrain in mumbai as the first phase then the design of a physical interface to re-listen the field recordings from the walk.

The interface was built to offer a sound-field formed of an array of 16 – loudspeakers.
Each loudspeaker providing a specific sound location. forming 16 – localised mono fields.

visitors could move free in this field, be close to the speakers or
traverse across to listen.

Within the sound field, there are interactive – zonesĀ  for the listeners/visitors:
SKIP (next, next archive set of 8 field recordings with a common sound subject in all recording as different events)
HOLD the grain and go right inside the sound and stay, move through varying granular widths.

The sound field is also conceived to be a cyclic space; where a sound recordist could come again
with preferred microphones, boom poles and reflectors and walk or dance around
choreographically composing another set of re-coded sound walks.

mithi_river