What would a space sounds like? How would you describe a space except for its visual element? If we exclude all the visual elements of a space, what would be left in your memory?

You entered a room, what is the first thing you notice? How the room looks like? How many people were there? Or maybe you noticed there’s a broken windows in the corner. Later on, someone asked you to describe that room, you might say something like “Oh it’s quite a big room full of people, with hardwood floor, white wall and high ceiling, oh, and there’s a broken window there.” All these descriptions are the visual elements of that room. But what about the soundscape of that room? In most of the time, we didn't pay enough attention to what a room sounds like. So the question arise, what would a space/room sounds like? 

Listen.to is an installation project aims to make its user to explore soundscape of a certain space and to think about how can we alter a space’s soundscape except for actual making sounds? In Listen.to, we placed a camera and two speakers on the rail above a corridor and divided the space into 21 different areas and map each area to a unique sound in Openframeworks.

The sounds from the middle parts of the corridor are from the same jazz song but different instruments, so ideally if you want to hear the "full song" you have to have at least 7 people standing on each blocks. Sounds near the wall are some unpleasant noises such as scratching black boards and some white noises. We encouraged people to explore the soundscape of the corridor, we don't tell them what this project was about and observe how them react to the sound in the space. it's also interesting to see how these sounds changed the way people walk and behave in the corridor. 

Collaboration with Haylee Jung