play the SOUNDSCAPE COMPOSITION while reading
(loop)
0:00
Habitat #4.2 is the name of a site-specific sound installation created in collaboration with my husband John Klima. It has been presented at Festival Extremo 2026, in Braga, during the international listening day - July 18th.
The process started a month before, with a visit: we chose a site in the woods next to a church and made some field recordings in the surrounded area. I wanted to interwine recognisable sounds, drones and occasional instruments within a soundscape composition, played back through several loudspeakers distributed through the space. We modified the speakers with light sensors, so that the volume of each audio channel depended on the light captured by the corresponding sensor.
In addition, we hung some amplified chairs on the trees and added fishing lines; they became the Swinging Bass Chairs. Moreover, John created a program that played back randomly chosen bells every hour: those mixed with the physical ones from church, confounding the time.
Blankets, pillows and garden chairs invited people to contract and expand their listening acccording to the soundscape, which never repeated: it varied depending on the hour of the day, the specific place where a person was at the moment, and all the other non-recorded sounds.
The soundscape composition was amplified through five speakers, whose amplitude depended on the natural light captured through photosensors. There was a sensor for the subwoofer, and two for the left and right channels - yes the audio file was stereo, yet it certainly felt like multi-channel due to the speaker setup in space.
A digital clock program was running on a tablet swinging on a baby bed. It played recorded church bells at the hour, while the physical bells nextby were sounding as well.
Music is the construction of subjective time, after all...
We made two Swinging Bass Chairs, with fishing lines attached to metal cookie boxes containing piezo microphones connected to amplifiers hung on a tree.
The heavier is the body sitting down and swinging, the greater is the string tension - and the higher is the pitch.
Clearly, people's occasional motivation to interact with the Bass Chairs emerged from listening. They felt invited to discover musicality in subtle noises, and sometimes they dribled the fishing lines too.
All layered within the sonic bed, contracting and expanding attention, from inwards to outwards and back, until the faint of the day.
