Lullaby For Depressed River Mussels

Sound intervention on site, interactive sound installation
MIARD, Piet Zwart Insitut
Dutch Design Week︎︎︎
2024

This speculative sound installation engages with aquatic environments affected by noise pollution. It combines hydrophone recordings of ferries, motors and underwater soundscapes with lullaby-based vocal experiments tuned to specific frequencies.

The process involves walking, listening and singing on site, with the voice as a resonant tool interacting with water-borne vibrations. A submerged hydrophone captures underwater sound, while a speaker made of recycled mussel shells sends song back into the water to offset the impact of noise.

The work acknowledges river mussels’ extreme sensitivity to acoustic disturbance, treating this fragility as a central condition of the system rather than a theme.

Silicone mussel-shell casts act as tactile interfaces that trigger sound events, sent into the water through embedded speakers and electronic modulation. Through headphones, the resulting acoustic field forms a feedback loop between submerged sound, vibration and bodily perception.

The installation constructs a speculative non-human listening condition in which human, infrastructural and aquatic perception partially translate into one another while remaining fundamentally misaligned.

Technical support by Lukasz Zuber