Interactive Sound Interface
Angela Ying Neubauer
Design Investigations,
Natural History Museum Vienna
The 2.5-minute soundscape compresses millions of years of evolution into a single composition. Listeners are guided from the silence of primordial waters through bubbling bacterial concerts to the acoustic world of this fictional species. By stretching beyond human hearing and deep into geological time, it invites us to reconsider our place within the larger story of life on Earth.
Developed within Design Investigations’ collaboration with the Natural History Museum Vienna, the project responds to the exhibition of the 2.1-billion-year-old Gabonionta fossils, evidence of multicellular life 1.5 billion years earlier than previously believed. Their extinction shows that evolution does not move in a straight line; many forms of life began and were lost. Saltwater Crescendo gives sound to one of these lost possibilities.
A custom interface lets listeners navigate the timeline from 3500 to 700 million years ago, dialing forward and backward through the soundscape at their own pace. The audio itself is built from high-sensitivity microphone and hydrophone recordings of ice, sponges, bacteria, and more. To house the electronics, I bent and engraved acrylic glass sheets into a custom enclosure for the Arduino microcontroller that drives the interface.