Everyday soundscapes

By Anna Cattaneo

Topic: Personal Data

Medium: Video

Institute: Politecnico di Milano

Year: a.a. 2022-2023

Through everyday soundscapes I explore my daily sound experience by giving it a visual form and observing it from two opposing but simultaneously authentic points of view. On the one hand, sound as seen by software: a technically and physically “objective” wave that can be visualized through formulas and interfaces. On the other, sound identified and selected according to my emotional experience: being particularly sensitive to this sense, noises often influence my state of mind. What is by its nature elusive and labile, becomes for me instead persistent and exciting, able to annoy, calm or evoke and the sounds that are reproduced in this infopoetry all have these influences. The result is a supercut of personal sounds that will be played along with the audio wave that the recordings generate.

Featured image of the project Everyday soundscapes

Metaphor used:

The evocative image I chose to use is juxtaposition: contrastingly showcasing the two sides of the coin. The software, in fact, makes no distinction between what is annoying and what is pleasant: sound is sound, the factors taken into account to measure it are fixed and unambiguous. In my experience, on the other hand, sound is nuanced and means something different each time.

Intended Meaning:

What I do not see, I tend to ignore, and so I do with sound as well. In fact, as soon as I place the same attention on it as I do on other experiences, I realize how totalizing it is, and in recent years this has happened to me more and more, until I have developed a special consideration of it. On any given day I go from hearing terrible sounds of noise pollution to friendly voices, whispers, music, pleasure. Through everyday soundscapes my goal is to highlight this important fact of my everyday life and use it to tell an audiovisual story.

Source:

Sampled audios recorded in different sound-rich situations throughout my routine