The Sound of Silo 468, Helsinki

Sound artist and Doctoral student at Aalto University Andrea Mancianti recorded a peculiar acoustic environment at the outskirts of Helsinki, Finland - the Silo 468. Due to its highly reflective, circular walls, the sound reflections strongly depend on where the sound source is and where you as a listener stand. Previously, the music recordings from the silo were integrated into a VR piece, remote/displaced by quietSpeaker shown at Ars Electronica 2020.

The goal of these measurements is to construct a virtual acoustic twin of the silo to recreate the sound design process and the listening experience in virtual reality. For flexible virtualization, many loudspeaker positions were recorded with a set of eight spherical microphone arrays (Zylia’s ZM-1S) each providing a 3rd order Ambisonics stream. Here, you can listen to the impulse response of a center position which was binauralized for headphone playback.

The project is supported by MAGICS, and we are excited to explore the possibilities of a more natural remote presence in audio-visual art installations.