How do we hear? What do we hear? How do we shape our sonic environment? More than half of the world’s population now lives in cities, but do we notice what our new habitats sound like? How does human presence impact on the acoustic reality? Raise Your Voice Collective present an interactive engagement with ideas of the city, living and lived-in systems, the facts of urban life, and the sounds that these produce.

Venue

Kraak Gallery • 11, Stevenson Square, Manchester, M1 1DB (map)
Open daily: 11am – 6pm

Opening Night

Join the Raise Your Voice Ensemble from 6:30pm on 11 May for a special performed introduction to the exhibition, featuring new compositions, improvisations and experimental electronics, plus a laptop and Bugbrand Modular Synthesizer set from special guest Richard Scott reflecting on the sounds of Manchester past and present.

Artworks

Pond Life III — Patrick Sanan & Sam Salem

A collaboration between Californian mathematician Patrick Sanan and Manchester-based composer and artist Sam Salem, Pond Life presents viewers with a tactile interactive experience. Using programming that mimics evolutionary systems, the luminous interface projected onto a tank of water allows visitors to interact with an ecosystem whose behaviour reveals perhaps the paths of humanity’s earliest migrations and the first foundations of settlements as the digital organisms gather around precious natural resources, represented by different coloured light. [http://www.sanansalem.com/]

Hô: a Sonic Expedition to Vietnam — Ricardo Climent

Hô presents the gallery visitor with the opportunity to navigate their way through an imaginary sonic expedition to Vietnam. Using a large steering wheel reminiscent of that of an old sailing ship, the viewer moves their way through a series of audiovisual puzzles uncovering in the process the unique soundworld and culture of Vietnam.
Hô employs open-source software techniques to offer the gallery visitor a computer-game-like experience in which the usual visual parameters are relegated in importance in favour of a focus on acoustic exploration.

A Scrapbook of Metro Sounds — Kaho Cheung

Whether known as le métro or the underground, the subway or rapid transit, the sound of trains rattling through tunnels is a key feature of the soundscapes of many of the world’s biggest cities. From 2007 to 2010, artist and composer Kaho Cheung travelled around the world collecting recordings of these transport systems. The installation A Scrapbook of Metro Sounds allows the gallery visitor to make virtual acoustic journeys between Helsinki, Tokyo, Bangkok, London, Berlin, Stockholm, Hong Kong, New York, Athens, Barcelona, San Francisco and Valencia, revealing in the process a globalised network of similar sounds, but also the subtle cultural variations in the deployment of this most everyday of technologies.

Plus: Field recordings and tape music.