Every day we read or hear somewhere a topic that is related to pollution, but we don’t directly embody with it. During this experiment, I would like to show that air pollution is embedded in the structure of our urban environment. I will use sound as the measured substance since it is something people in general don’t directly relate to pollution what will give it the effect of a surprise. The sound can be transformed and transferred from one place to another. This means that other substances that we can’t see with our naked eye can travel through the air too. The measured sound works now as a tool to show various elements could travel through the air.

As a method, I recorded an event (football game) happening in London from several distances. I mapped these four places and related them to the recorded sounds and their spectral frequency display. The combination of these three factors shows the impact of the created noise on our human ear, specific for each spot. More in detail the recorded sound will explain the loudness of the produced sound, the Styrofoam balls represent the trilling of our inner ear related to the frequency and the spectral frequency display combines them both in a diagram (colour: loudness, height: frequency). The combination of these factors tries to explain the generated sound pollution of the event.

The information I collected on my journey from close to the event back into the urban environment of the city, shows the produced sounds specific for this certain moment. So, the event creates specific moments of sound creation, namely: strange silence pockets as well as extreme noise. In this way, it breaks with the normal occurring sound pollution in this particular urban environment.

To mediate this finding I took the sound recordings away from their natural environment. The recorded event is now abstracted, the listener doesn’t directly relate to the place where the sound is recorded. The sound gets another definition. More specifically it shows that sound waves don’t create a border. They cover a wider area then the limited space of the event. The recordings will represent the phenomena of the widespread of information and the loss of control of the spread of sound from a particular event.

The final result is an installation that reveals the impact of created sound related to a particular event. It will make people aware of the constant noise that is created in our urban environment. The reproduced sound gets an unexpected relationship with the recorded event. To conclude it will create a new way of approaching the problem of living in an urban environment in which sound pollution is embedded.