Culture Walls Echoing Sounds of Distant Worlds

Abstract. We propose an interactive installation consisting of three walls, each placed in a different part of the World. Instead of representing a barrier between cultures, these Walls create a bridge between them, connecting them in a pan-cultural audio artifact; the Walls encircle the Earth in a network of interconnected points, symbolizing the unification of its human inhabitants at each point. The principle is simple: Each Wall listens for human speech and laughter in the environment and records it using computer technology. The Wall then modulates the sounds in strange and beautiful ways and sends them to another Wall in a different part of the world, where it gets played back. The Walls thus echo the ambience and daily strife from one culture to another. Together the Walls create a pan-cultural, pan-continental audio artifact, connecting societies and people from different worlds through the medium of modulated audio ambience