Åsa Helena Stjerna is a Swedish artist who creates site-specific sound installations, exploring sound’s potential and connection to time, place, as well as human/non-human. As a researcher, she is interested in the transformative ability of sound and what it means to make a difference in the era of Anthropocene and Advanced Capitalism.
MARE BALTICUM
Mare Balticum is the artistic outcome of the participation in the EU/Life funded scientific investigation BIAS: Baltic Sea Information on the Acoustic Soundscape. Gathering scientists from six Baltic nations, the project investigated human-induced noise in the Baltic. Deploying thirty-eight hydrophones, recording different locations in the Baltic, these recordings were made at exactly the same moment every hour, each day, for a year; creating a sonic map of the Baltic enabling the scientists to measure the effects of human-induced sound in the ocean.
In the sound installation, each loudspeaker represents a specific place in the Baltic where sound recordings were made. Distinct places bleed into one another in the sound installation, sometimes acting as solitary voices and sometimes as ensembles. Together, they constitute a geographic choreography that invites the visitor to move from place to place.
The area of her work that interested me most was based on sonification.
Sonification is the use of non-speech audio to represent information.
I’m conflicted on my opinions of sonification as an art form.
This is mostly because data, something that is seen as having an ‘objective truth’, is then potentially skewed by an artist’s subjective application of the sonification process, which then has the ability to completely undermine, or even negate the entire concept that is trying to be presented.
For instance, the arbitrary use of setting all the sounds to a scale might make the information more pleasing and recognisable to the listener, but at what point is the meaning of said information lost?
I can certainly see its value as a means of education and creating interest in a field that might otherwise be dismissed as numbers that have no meaning.
An area of sonification that is interesting to me is its potential use in computer games and simulations. It would allow for dynamic, and potentially, interactive sounds based on complex information.