Everyday Noise and the Spatiality of the Ear

Daily noise is neither silent nor neutral. It is produced by systems never designed for conscious listening, like a ventilation shaft, the friction of a metro door, keystrokes in an office, and a dripping tap, and it accumulates in the spaces where bodies learn, wait, move, and endure. This project draws on recordings of these noises captured across my own domestic spaces, transit zones, workplaces, and the in-between moments that structure an ordinary day. It does not ask how everyday noise is heard, but how it is felt, and what traces it leaves inside the body.

 

The ear is not a passive receiver. It is a system that continuously works, protects itself, and tires, and this installation is an attempt to make that tiredness visible. These are not sounds I set out to capture as remarkable; they are sounds I had largely stopped noticing or believed I had. The sounds I thought I had tuned out had never stopped acting on me, they had simply become invisible as causes.

 

The installation is built around three screens and a pair of headphones, each carrying a different layer of the same sound. The headphones deliver the recording alongside a spoken reflection on what that noise produced in the body; the first screen locates it on a map of daily routes; the second shows its spectrogram, the frequency, duration, and intensity made visible; the third runs a real-time cochlear model in Touch Designer, in which the hair cells corresponding to that frequency respond as the sound plays that is a process the ear performs continuously and invisibly, externalized onto a screen, so that the act of hearing becomes something that can be watched.