2024 — ongoing
Artistic research on Noise Reduction Algorithms
Through a spectral analysis of field recordings from Berlin Noise Re(in)Duction addresses often overlooked listening practices that are involved in our everyday life, putting in question the algorithms’ inherent biases of race, gender, ability, and class. Sound sources of such as AC fans, radiators, home electronics, ambient noise, unwanted reverb and echo, wind, traffic, and conversations, are transformed into with clicks, pops, crackles, distortion, and other forms of digital “waste.” By deconstructing the different processes of sonic transformations, the project negotiates the boundaries of different understanding of what noise is and what is not.
Noise Re(in)Duction is particularly interested in mobile technologies that use noise reduction algorithms such as noise canceling headphones and mobile videoconference software. These technologies present and affront to the ways that we perceive and relate with our sonic surroundings, thus creating an implicitly sonic augmented reality that alienates further from unmediated sensible experiences.
The modification and combination of environmental sources, together with the physical isolation of headphones, provide an ideal situation to question the ways in which we perceive sound and noise mediated by audio technology and musical aesthetics. When noise becomes an aesthetic criterion for music, what is left to be reduced or cancelled?
In a world of hyper-mediation and overconsumption which induces a “Mental State of Noise,” paying close attention to noise sources and refocusing our listening habits provides a new perspective on noise and media oversaturation facilitated by tech corporations.
_Lecture-performance at the Speculative Sound Synthesis Symposium 2024.
Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics, University of Music and Performing Arts Graz.
26-28 September 2024, Graz, Austria. More here.
Akademie der Künste.
1-3- October 2024, Berlin, Germany.
Haus der Kulturen der Welt.
January 31st 2025, Berlin, Germany.
More here.
20 February 2025
Berlin, Germany
More here.
Review here.