World premiere in Berlin
Seaphony -
The Symphony of Life on Planet Ocean
Seaphony is the new spatial sound & light art installation by Chris Watson, Tony Myatt and Theresa Baumgartner. The site-specific immersive installation is part of the exhibition Seaphony, which enables you to experience the depth and vastness of the ocean and its unheard-of soundscape through spatial sound, light and imagination. Seaphony celebrated its world premiere in May 2022 at the Alte Münze in Berlin Mitte.
The richest world of sound on earth is hidden in the oceans. With an underwater journey from pole to pole, staged as an immersive three-dimensional audio-visual sound art installation, Seaphony takes us along the great ocean currents from the southern Polar Sea to the vastness of the Pacific and the depths of the Atlantic with sound worlds as diverse as the drumming cascades of thousands of the smallest crustaceans, the haunting songs of marine mammals to the sounds of the largest and loudest animals that have ever lived on the planet, the great whales. But the increasingly prominent anthropogenic sounds also demand their space. In the new Symphony of the Sea, they form the breakpoints and disharmonies in the confrontation between sea and man.
The installation with three-dimensional spatial sound interprets the acoustic and visual characteristics of the ocean's dimensions, vastness and dynamics as seemingly infinite into real space.
In the documentary, the makers and artists explain how the sound & light installation was created, what turns the installation into a special experience and why it is so important to let us humans immerse ourselves in this wonderful sound world of the oceans.
Seaphony documentary
Making a sound & light art installation
Ocean Noise
The invisible pollution of the seas
In the darkness of the seas, sound waves play a crucial role in the communication, navigation and orientation of marine creatures. Sound waves, which travel faster and further in the water than in the air, are used by animals to mate and find their way through the vastness of the seas. Man-made noise interferes deeply with this communication process; ship sonars and engines, deep-sea mining, military manoeuvres and munitions blasts are causes of the so-called noise pollution of the world's oceans. Invisibly destructive, the force of sound waves sometimes kills marine life directly, or leads to images of dead whales washed up disoriented on coasts and beaches.
In a three-part podcast from The Guardian, Chris Watson takes us into the world of marine underwater sounds and explores the threat of anthropogenic noise:
More information on noise pollution in the oceans and what to do about it can be found here:
Credits
Artists and team
For Seaphony we were able to win outstanding and award-winning artists: Chris Watson, sound artist & field recordist will compose Seaphony and stage it with Tony Myatt in a large-scale, spatially experienceable 3D Ambisonic sound installation. Light artist Theresa Baumgartner contributes a more abstract visuality that immerses us fully in this underwater world.
Idea and concept: Ina Krüger
Field Recording & Composition: Chris Watson
Additional Sound Recording & Sound Engineering: Tony Myatt
Light Artist: Theresa Baumgartner
Executive Producer: Diana Schniedermeier
Partner: Interactive Media Foundation, Bund für Umwelt und Naturschutz Deutschland (BUND), GEO, Deutschlandfunk and more
