Description

What if we could play the Earth like a musical instrument?

Sounds of Soil is a sound performance where five performers use custom devices (“Soil Scopes”) that capture hidden data from the soil and translate into a musical composition. The invisible signals from the ground become vibrations in the air, as they walk on the surface.

They performers in an improvisational choreography, translating soil readings of moisture and nutrients into discrete notes played by different digital instruments. The results are unpredictable, chaotic, sometimes harmonic, and sometimes dissonant. The composition can become complex and multi-layered, sometime repetitive, sometimes sparse. The Earth itself drives the composition and there is no human hand in the actual generation of which notes or instruments get played.

The soil beneath our feet is a dynamic ecosystem, with pockets that are wetter or drier and areas with varying mineral content. Each point on the ground has a unique physical composition, which the sensors detect and translate into distinct musical patterns as the performers move across the landscape, testing different spots in the earth. Nothing is predictable.

As an improvised performance, the audience is treated to a range of digital instruments, from familiar tones such as piano and cello to more experimental sounds reminiscent of the space age resonance of a theremin.

Building upon the chance-based compositional methods of John Cage and the ambient soundscapes of Brian Eno, the performance has no fixed endpoint or choreographic direction. The performers determine how the composition unfolds over time, making each rendition a truly live and responsive collaboration between human and soil.