The following blogpost covers the content of the scientific paper named “SOIL CHOIR v.1.3 – soil moisture sonification installation”. It was published at the NIME 20 conference in Birmingham by Jiří Suchánek from Janáček Academy of Music and Performing Arts.
The project deals with the sonification of moisture values in soil, where each tube is filled with a different type of soil. The tubes form independent units, each consisting of three low-cost capacitive soil moisture sensors. The sensors are located at different depths and send information about the moisture values to a Bela board where they get transformed into organized sound structures.
The challenge in this project are the slowly changing values of the moisture sensors, letting the artist focus on creating a suitable listening experience for slowly evolving data inputs. Therefore, the idea was to create a sonic behavior similar to that of a Geiger counter.
I also tried to understand the sound mapping, unfortunately I did not understand it completely as I need to dig deeper into the theory of sonification first. However, I think this project shows the potential of sonification in nature and the ability to give a voice to normally silent processes. In my opinion the contrast between expected human musical time scale and the extremely slow environmental processes could listeners let rethink the perception of time.
References:
SOIL CHOIR v.1.3 – soil moisture sonification installation; Jiří Suchánek; Nime 2020
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