References:
Abram, D. (1996). The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World. New York: Pantheon Books.
LaBelle, B. (2006). Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art. New York/London: Continuum.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (2012). Phenomenology of Perception (D. A. Landes, Trans.). London/New York: Routledge. (Original work published 1945).
Three different kind of microphones, three subjects, three levels we figured out in four places.
Triangulations is an experiment to explore how the sounds that constantly unfold simultaneously in the world can be archived.
Here, “archiving” means both preserving and letting go again: when listening back, the circumstances have already shifted, and the sounds are no longer the same. What does this perpetual change do to us – and can we ever truly make ourselves aware of it?
As we attempt to capture the sounds of our environment, always subject to determination, we become aware of the alternating play between control and loss of control, while the world around us updates itself every second, changing its conditions. Yet spaces remain familiar and produce the illusion of permanence. How can we connect with them, what differences do we discover between micro-, meso- and macro-levels? At what point are we surprised by ourselves and by the environment we are interacting with?
The idea begins with creating and recording an echo. The experimental setup takes the shape of a triangle – Triangulations. If the microphones at all three points are started simultaneously, is it possible that these so-called distributed microphone recordings can capture the environment in such a way that, when layered, they produce an echo? The echo can here be understood as an acoustic visualization of life that unfolds simultaneously yet in different places.
From the slowly eroding stone to the intangible wind, from the underwater-world to the ant undertaking its long journey through grass and soil to its next task, from the bunkers seemingly built for eternity back to ourselves, diving into these worlds only to leave them again.
What remains are these acoustic memories.
The Illussion of Permanence
The perception of environments is marked by a paradox:
we experience them as familiar and stable, while they are in fact subject to constant transformation.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty described this as a “being-in-the-flow”, in which the world is continuously reconstituted through embodied perception.
While sound is by definition ephemeral, always dissipating and slipping away, certain auditory events nevertheless create a sense of permanence.
Familiar sounds: the hum of a specific street, the rhythm of a passing train, or the resonance of voices in a particular space. They do not simply remind us of home, but actively constitute it.
As Schafer suggests, the soundscape defines the identity of a place as much as its visual features (p. 8). Thus, permanence in sound is not ontological but experiential: it is built through repetition, recognition, and embodied attachment.
In our project, this paradox surfaced in the tension between the fleeting nature of our recordings and the affective stability they produced when layered and replayed.
The aspect of control
This insight complicates the notion of control.
In postproduction, we confronted the limits of synchronization: technical tools allow us to approximate precision, but never to eliminate latency entirely.
Here, the dialectic of control and non-control becomes evident. As we discovered, sound resists absolute mastery; we cannot control it, we can only capture it.
The experiment thus revealed not only the fragility of technical synchronization, but also the epistemic lesson that listening always entails engaging with what has already slipped beyond our grasp.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty reminds us of the inexhaustibility of lived experience:
“The world is not what I think, but what I live through. I am open to the world, I have no doubt that I am in communication with it, but I do not possess it; it is inexhaustible” (p. xviii).
This perspective clarifies the limits of control in our experiment. We cannot master sound; we can only inhabit it momentarily, capturing fragments that are already slipping into the past.
The meso-level composes rhythmic couplings among bodies, infrastructures, and weather. Here we do not isolate single events but read recurrences and interlocks. Our “triangle” allows comparative simultaneity: what aligns across sites registers as a meso-pattern, what misaligns discloses friction. This is the domain of rhythmanalysis, where social, natural, and technical rhythms fold into everyday space; and of acoustic-ecological typologies (keynotes, signals, soundmarks) that give those relations operational names. We therefore treat each intervention as a tempo offer that either entrains to, or marks limits within, an already pulsing milieu.
At the macro-level we consider territorial formations and large-scale frames within which micro details and meso rhythms are situated.
Our triangulated capture renders the city’s acoustic order as distributed structure rather than a single viewpoint: listening becomes a way to map how infrastructures and imaginaries produce space.
Contemporary soundscape standards emphasize that such mappings are perceptual-contextual rather than purely physical; macro claims must therefore be grounded in experienced context and not just in metrics. We align with work on acoustic territories, where sounding and listening are performative acts that shape places and social life.
In our presentation, macro patterns emerge when layers from multiple sites cohere as milieu (e.g., harbor cadence across neighborhoods), making territorial logics audible.
The recorded sounds are analyzed to study how echoes represent an acoustic visualization of life in different environments.
Creating an echo
When layering our distributed recordings, our hypothesis was that they might generate an echo-effect.
What began as a pure experiment quickly raised a technical and philosophical question: is an exact, synchronous alignment of tracks ever possible, or can we only approximate an idealized simultaneity?
On a purely acoustic level, even the most immediate sound that reaches our ear already arrives with delay — each sinus wave is, strictly speaking, a trace of the past.
All three microphones are activated simultaneously to capture distributed sound recordings that create layered echoes.
Three different microphones are strategically positioned at each vertex of the triangle to ensure diverse sound capture.
The project was realized by three participants, each working with different instruments to interact with the surrounding environment. In doing so, we treated our instruments not as isolated sound sources but as mediators that both intervened in and echoed the acoustic conditions around us. As LaBelle notes:
“Sound and space are inextricably connected, interlocked in a dynamic through which each performs the other” (LaBelle 2006: 12)
Our improvisations thus became a double gesture: performative experiments in producing echo and acts of inhabiting the sonic fabric that linked us, our instruments and the environment surround us, into a shared and interacting field.
For the experimental setup at four locations and the resulting recordings, we used three different microphones:
A hydrophone, a geophone, and a field-recorder.
With this setup we explored how micro-, meso-, and macro-levels can be made acoustically perceptible and sought to enable different approaches to our environment and to render the sounds of the hidden audible and experienceable. This method allows for a layered recording of the environment, reflecting its complex acoustic characteristics.
