Saltwater Crescendo
sound art, listening device
Vienna, 2022
What if we could listen to deep time as symphonies?
PROJECT BY
Angela Ying Neubauer
Special thanks to Jonas Bohatsch
& the Angewandte Coding Lab
Initiated at Design Investigations,
University of Applied Arts Vienna
Even in what we call silence, the world is never still; minerals strain, water presses, cells vibrate – sounding a vast, inaudible chorus beyond human ears
Saltwater Crescendo is an immersive sonic speculation that reimagines Earth’s early oceans through sound. The 2.5-minute soundscape compresses millions of years of evolution, guiding listeners from the eerie silence of primordial waters through bubbling bacterial concerts to the emergent aquatic “songs” of a fictional species. As these imagined beings evolve to harness soundwaves, their sonic ecology reveals how deeply life and acoustics intertwine. A custom-built interface lets listeners navigate the timeline from 3500 to 700 million years ago. By stretching beyond human hearing, the work invites us to experience deep time as an evolving composition — and reconsider our place within it.
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, potential evidence of multicellular life appearing 1.5 billion years earlier than previously believed, but later disappeared. 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.