we just started to translate our txt’s in english. enjoy.
soundscapes in Pavia
Pavia is a silent city: few cars in the city center, quiet crowd and a light sound of vehicles wheel stumbling on stone pavements. Is it possible that a city can have a public problem, with its soundscape? And why the “hidden dream” seems always to be silence? We have asked to the citizens of Pavia what do they think of the city sound. We have listened their opinions and discovered a sensibility about soundscape different from who is born in Pavia and who come from outside. The indigenous inhabitants have a trained ear to silence and lament the absence of it. But noises in Pavia are not the ones of the industrial metropolis, imagined by Luigi Russolo. It’s a chit-chatting, a human body resonance, sociality that become sound in the streets. For who comes for big cities that’s not noise.
We researched connecting structure, urban furniture, though a social agglutinant tool and a communicational device.
Theremin Urbani / Urban Theremin
Based on a multidisciplinary approach, that includes architecture, semiotics geography, economy, musicology, we have mapped soundscapes in Pavia. We have produced a map with meaningful areas classified by noise, silence, sociability; hidden silence corner as San Michele; hype-noisy-places as piazza della Vittoria, Strada Nuova; or in-between places as piazza Leonardo Da Vinci.
On the base of this complex soundscape we have adapted an instrument as a spatial tool, the Theremin. This is an instruments that makes music without mechanic energy, as a orchestra maestro simply moves his hands and this movements creates music.”, Lev Thermen, Theremin inventor, 1930.
The urban theremin is an interface set in the public space that produces music only when human being are preesnt. It has a “voice” that is situated in between silence and noise. Urban theremin has the potential to make people aware to be active body in space, thus theirs wandering in public space produce a train of consequences – acoustic consequences. Those consequences transform public live in the urban space.
Urban Theremin it’s a tool for inclusiveness, that equalize different perception by locals and non-locals on a single tune, that symphonize indigenous, students, foreigner, migrants.
Different sensibilities to sound aggregate thanks to the use of space as fundamental to produce sound via Theremin, in a scope of urban audiophilia, or the transposition of audiophiles into the public realm.
Theremin Urbani are site-specific. We propose two versions, both low cots, easy-to-install.
1. Canopy, a grid of metallic elements, positioned 3 meters from the floor in piazza della Vittoria.
2. Crop Circle, a forest of poles with round section, installed in public garden of the Castello.
Our Urban Theremins create an acoustic network: they connect different areas and habits in Pavia. Communication is not a mere sharing of information. Is everything that surrounds information in time and space, the framework where people interact and socialize.
Every Urban Theremin will also be a WiFi antenna; Theremin will allow people to be connected and participate in a website that will display a virtual map of the soundscape of Pavia, a database of the produced sounds produced by city-user and Urban Theremins.
