Big Earth Listening

An interactive sound installation that allowed you to hear the world beneath your feet

M-Pavilion is an annual, temporary pavilion that can be found in the Queen Victoria Gardens in Melbourne’s CBD, each year the pavilion is redesigned by a notable architect and it serves as a public event space each summer. Big Earth Listening was an interactive art installation designed by SensiLab that ran for the length of the 2018-2019 season at M-Pavilion.

During the construction of the pavilion an array of hydrophones (underwater microphones) were buried in key locations around the site. These microphones ran back to a server that streamed them out live over the internet. These streams were used in a interactive visual piece that allowed you to float around the pavilion and hear the sounds of the ground around. The microphones would pick up interesting sounds like the creak of tree roots and the sounds of rain. There was also a VR version of the experience which allowed you to immersive yourself even deeper in the sounds.

I worked on the installation of hydrophones and the audio processing and streaming side of the project.

An online version of the experience (using recorded audio) can be found here